SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Nancy Toomey Fine Art opened an exhibition of works by Jud Bergeron titled Subspace Biographies, on view from February 2 to March 25, 2023.

“There is nothing worse than / An undetermined person” is the refrain sung by Robert Pollard in the song “Subspace Biographies” from which Jud Bergeron gets inspiration for his exhibition’s title. These lyrics have been Bergeron’s mantra for years and words to live by. The artist is determined to create, and this determination culminates in a desire to take an idea from conception to conclusion. “I am interested in all the steps and iterations along the way,” says Bergeron, “and how the process influences the outcome.”

Bergeron’s art practice is focused mainly on iteration, scale, and material. He uses iteration to expand and mine ideas, scale to take those ideas and realize them from maquette to monument, and material to tell a story. Where there was a drawing there is now a silk screen print, where there was a silk screen print there is now relief sculpture, where there was relief sculpture there is now sculpture in the round.

The Cyclopean Runways series originated from a desire to learn the process of silkscreen printing. Bergeron started with a group of simple abstract drawings on a grid where two or three geometric shapes were laid on top of each other. The focus on the drawings was for them to be formal and balanced, simple and complicated at the same time. The drawings were then used to make a large two-color silkscreen print.

Happy with the results of the print, Bergeron made the same images into a series of 10 wall reliefs. These reliefs were then cast in bronze and resin. He sat with these pieces for almost a year and began thinking of what else they could become. “They have a brutalist feel to them and I mused about the fundamentals of sculpture and architecture and the simplicity of stacking blocks as a child,” says Bergeron. “This resulted in extruding the forms in relief into five inch blocks which were 3D printed and molds were made on each block.”

From the molds Bergeron cast hundreds of wax copies of each form and began stacking, arranging, chopping them up and reassembling them into more complicated sculptural forms. These pieces became studies for larger works. Once he has worked out the pieces in maquette form, he then photographs them and makes 3D models of the best ones. These models are used to scale up the pieces in a 3D print to bronze cast process. Or, for much larger versions, he inputs the models into AutoCad and creates plans of each piece that can be laser cut in any metal and fabricated to scale.

Jud Bergeron lives and works in San Francisco, California. Born in 1972 in Winslow, Arizona, Bergeron trained classically at the Old Lyme Academy of Fine Art in Connecticut. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in cities including New York, London, and Lyon. His art has recently been shown at the de Young Museum and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, and Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bergeron is the co-founder and executive director of The Space Program SF, an artist in residency program in San Francisco.

Subspace Biographies is Jud Bergeron’s second solo show with Nancy Toomey in San Francisco.