Wendy Judge—Souvenir Views

Wish you could experience a destination beyond your reach? An adventure awaiting any amateur explorer or general enthusiast – Souvenir Views allows you to take this journey at your leisure. See wide and immeasurable scenes laid out before you, all under one roof in the heart of Dublin 8. Geology, geography, glaciology meteorology, terrestrial magnetism, electrical phenomena, seismology, zoology (both vertebrate and invertebrate), botany, oceanography, ethnology and archeology: observe these brochure moments from the many scenic vantage points punctuated along the route.

Wendy Judge’s practice is committed to armchair travel and the authentic experience; the touristic frontier and the anomalous within the landscape. Her projects are about journeys never taken but based on hearsay. Drawn from someone else’s tales as well as someone else’s research, the subject matter of Souvenir Views is factually disconnected, from territories unknown to the artist. The theoretical tourism of Rebecca Solnit and John Urry, is channeled through the bleak rocky formations encountered by Kurt Vonnegut and Herman Melville, to reveal a landscape of neither particular time nor territory. Her work questions what is meant or understood as real in the same terms as Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika, where the author wrote his novel without ever having visited the country in question. Indeed we may find that armchair experience and third–hand information is of more practical use than first–hand experience in understanding any contemporary reality.

Souvenir Views is the first of an ongoing series of exhibitions in the new Pallas Projects/Studios at The Coombe, where invited artists are afforded an extended preparatory period, allowing them to attempt a leap, to consider, experiment and test the relationship between studio and exhibition practice. Wendy worked on-site utilising the gallery space with a lead in time of one month.

Wendy Judge and PP/S feature on arts programme Arena on RTE radio 1

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