Archive Project 26: Judie Bamber

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Judie Bamber Home Page | Spring 2005 Archive

The Project Series
Project 26: Judie Bamber

For nearly fifteen years, Los Angeles painter Judie Bamber has created exquisitely crafted representational paintings that investigate illusion, memory, perception, and temporality. Bamber incorporates traditional image making strategies that interrogate both the veracity of the photographic image and the artificiality of a painted image. Painting from photographic sources, she blurs the boundary between a mechanical record and a human mark.

September 6, 2002 4:00PM, 2004 Oil on canvas on board 30 X 36 inches

The diverse subject matter she has addressed encompasses culturally and auto-biographically charged content ranging from explicit paintings of female genitalia to nostalgic watercolors of photographs of her father to seductive seascapes.

For this exhibition, Bamber presents new paintings in the plein-air tradition. Shifting from the photograph as source, the artist first made watercolor studies of the Pacific Ocean from her former home in Malibu, then translated those images into oil paintings. The seascape paintings seemingly shift from minimalist abstractions to illusionistic images of the sea and sky, revealing the dichotomies between the artificial and the real. Gracefully rendered in subtle washes of color, the images simultaneously record the enduring relationship between the ocean and the sky and the constantly shifting color between the two. Bamber combines meticulous refinement and sensual corporeality with an intellectual rigor, exploring through evocative paintings personal and cultural subjectivities—connecting intensely private explorations with experiential studies of nature.

Judie Bamber’s exhibition is the twenty-sixth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator