Juliette M Ludeker
Juliette M Ludeker is a multimedia visual artist and a professor of English, having taught undergraduate research and writing for over 20 years. She earned a BFA in Studio Arts from Kutztown University, an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from West Chester University and completed all but dissertation of a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at Purdue University. Her background in art, along with a deep interest in art history and visual culture, informs her English teaching (and research interests), especially in assigning students to read texts or develop projects that represent a wide range of humanity and human productions of communication. Reciprocally, Juliette’s career in rhetoric, language, and research, influence her art-making, particularly through an embrace of inquiry, experimentation, reflection, and revision.
Primarily a camera-based artist, she also works in mixed media, painting, bookmaking, collage, printmaking, and fibers, often creating pieces in one medium to be in conversation with pieces created in a different medium. Juliette’s practices involve simultaneously working on multiple, ongoing series, but all of her subject matter has an element that is organic or somehow naturally-occurring–or gives the impression of such. She considers serendipity and "accident" (or randomness) to be her collaborators. Themes in her work include defamiliarization (ostranenie), temporality, nature and phenomena of nature, space and scale, existence and questions of existence, isolation and longing, silence, and prayer/contemplation.
Juliette considers herself a nomad, with the closest equivalent to "home" being the Middle Atlantic region of the United States. She currently lives and works in Maryland.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
I consider much of my camera-based work as exploring a space between the false binary of photography either as documentary or as pictorialism. Further, through my praxis, I seek to counter the pervasive narrative that "all" photography is violent, as theorized by Susan Sontag and extended by others. I am interested in complicating what photography "is" and "can be."
Borrowing from contemplative photography practices and theories of phenomenology, my goals are to use my studio practices to examine and draw conclusions about the/a "lived experience" of art-making, connections between the/my body and art-making, and role(s) sensory perception have in the creation of artworks--beyond vision alone. I am driven to make photographs because of photography’s [seemingly inherent] complex ties to "reality" and The Real, to assumptions of some kind of truth or authenticity. Important to my practice is to make images in-camera rather than to create or extensively manipulate them in digital software, though I do rely on minimal editing.
I am drawn to nature/naturally-occurring phenomena, subjects that are "real" and would exist whether I am aware of them or not, subjects that are "familiar" in the sense that they are ordinary, overlooked, commonplace, often without value. My effort is to make these ordinary things extraordinary, to mark their existence, to defamiliarize them so that I can (re)consider them, and the viewer can do likewise. At other times I am interested in disrupting or (re)interpreting scale and space so that an assumed 1:1 ratio is brought into question and the viewer is left feeling uncertain, untethered, or perhaps unsettled. My intention is for the viewer understand that what is suspended in the photographic frame must be real, even if it doesn’t appear to be.