Judith Blum Reddy

It should come as no surprise that an US American citizen who declared “I’m Afraid of Americans” in 2018 could also say, three years later, “Everything is not OK,” transforming the casual idiom “Everything is OK” into a critique of cultural cover-up in the name of politically correct normalcy. The first statement is the title of Judith Blum Reddy’s mixed media-series presented in the Artists’ Street, while the latter pronouncement, three years before the most recent US presidential election, is not only the title of another series, but also the title of her first retrospective in France, the country she claims as her second home. What might Blum Reddy add to that, five months into the 47th American Presidency?

The progeny of survivors from an Austrian Jewish family exterminated in Nazi concentration camps, Blum Reddy cites camp transportation records, among other lists of bureaucratic regimes like pre-1968 France and contemporary India. These documents, and other seemingly mundane archival material that finds meaning in numerical mass, form the backbone of her artistic material. Seemingly paradoxical, as autoportraits often are—for Blum Reddy views her self-reflexive practice as just that—she uses the very method she critiques as her own critical mode. The absurd abundance, teetering on the verge of the nonsensical, that she conjures in her assemblages delivers truth through her own form of direct democracy: an unself-censored art. With fragments like “happy pill,” “brain ache,” “It’s fantastic,” interspersed with “truth squad,” “clown parade,” or “axis of evil,” she counters blatant brainwashing with potent political grammar.

Text: Claire Tancons