Nothing Endures But Change

All is flux, nothing stays still. — Heraclitus

Judy Onofrio’s studio, located above her garage, is a massive space. It’s connected to her home via a small hallway that also serves as an office. In the studio, there are dozens of new and old tools, and depending on when you visit, you’ll see a few artworks in various stages of completion, as well as finished artworks that are ready to be photographed. It’s an active space where conversations and creative things are happening all the time. Then, against the walls, there are the shelves, boxes, bins, and tall stacks of drawers with hand-written labels. Pull out a drawer and inside you’ll see hundreds of carefully arranged pieces. You wouldn’t be mistaken for calling this storage collection an artwork in and of itself. Judy is a finder and a keeper of things; like a natural history museum collection, each piece had a previous life or a previous owner, it is a fragment of another object, or is part of an animal that no longer exists. This is where Judy’s work begins. Art is Judy’s life work and it’s her refuge. She is always working. When she’s composing and painting new sculptures in the studio, she’s also updating and restoring older pieces.

Bones Coral Ribs

The origin for this exhibition, like so many others, started with a conversation. I’ve known Judy for a long time; first as a colleague and mentor, then as a friend and inspiration. I’ve always appreciated her sense of humor, especially when she wields her decades of experiences and shares candid opinions about life and art. When it was on view at the Sioux City Art Center, Deep Dive was the first opportunity for Iowa audiences to see and appreciate Judy’s work. I was thrilled to share the evolution of her floor- and wall-mounted sculptures, and through them, what concepts are most important to her. This exhibition represents more than 20 years of Judy’s work and career, including brand new pieces and some spectacular pieces that have not been on view for a long time. There is a huge diversity of materials and creative modes at play in Deep Dive, but it is by no means a retrospective for such a prolific artist. Instead, the exhibition encapsulates some of the strongest creative consistencies and disruptions in Judy’s work.

Transformation is a conceptual thread that connects many, if notall, of Judy’s work. Change, as the saying goes, is the one constant in life. People, animals, and matter are constantly changing and experiencing evolutionary pressures. But howmuch do we see and appreciate those changes as they occur at the micro and macro level? How do we manage change? Or is it easier for us to simply succumb to its unrelenting power?

Every artist is an alchemist who has the almost impossible task of turning raw materials and ideas into form. Judy’s sculptures are fascinatingly intricate aggregations of big and small pieces that have gone through a process of change. And this focus on change is something that she has emphasized through the conflation of materials at her disposal. For example, each of the bones in Crown and Hold were salvaged, excavated, or given to her. She then imbues these skeletal ruins with a new life that evokes their origin while creating new associations with the human body and religious iconography.

Femur Ends Cervical Vertebrae Jewels Mosaic

Vanitas paintings, popular from the mid-16th to the 17th century, spoke to the fragility and transience of life. These highly detailed still-lifes often included common markers of time, such as skulls and urns, and sometimes fresh fish, ripe fruit, and blooming flowers. When you look at pieces such as Feast and Abundance, you can see how Judy brings the vanitas genre into the 21st century. She has always celebrated life’s pleasures, including the tastes and smells of delicious food and the joy of being alive. But look at how she’s brought together beautiful oranges, grapes, pomegranates, and even crabs, lobster, and trout. What a meal all these ingredients could be. Yet, while all of these are at the peak of freshness, it won’t take long for them to rot. The spine and other bones are memento mori that are carefully woven into this three-dimensional composition; one thing dies so another can live.

There is an infinity of details in Judy’s sculptures. Look closely and you’ll see how meticulously and carefully she assembles her work. Hydrangea is an important transitional piece in her career and it’s a powerfully succinct example of how she has combined the formal languages of bones, wood, paint, and even glass, yet the pieces that make up this fascinating sculpture are seamlessly joined. It’s as if it has always existed. The earliest piece in the exhibition, Mermaid on a Sofa, is made with the mosaic and collage technique she mastered in the 1990 – 2000s. Like a lot of collage artists, her process is all there on the surface. Look at how she uses bright colored grout to hold a galaxy of mirrored shards, beads, and ceramic pieces on the surface of the mermaid’s dress. Mermaid is emblematic of how Judy uses a multitude of smaller components to create new patterns and textures. The mosaics we are used to, such as stained glass or ceramic tiles, cohere thousands of individual pieces to create a surface texture or pattern, as you’d see in a floor or wall decoration. The magic of mosaics is how thousands of individual components shift from having their individual presence, to being anonymous in the service of the larger design, then back again.

Plywood Rock Metal Jawbones

Judy began her career as a ceramicist, then her work exploded in scale and complexity. In pieces such as Vessel and Chalice, she’s returned to those formative modes of making. Like a lot of contemporary craft artists, she is playing with the utilitarian function of these containers. Instead of clay, she’s used bones to create space. Each piece looks like a container but instead of holding liquids or food, these are containers of a more primal sort; their circular forms seem to spin and whirl, becoming holders for invisible forces and powers.

For some artists, COVID lockdowns made it difficult to continue working in the studio and showing their work. Judy got busy. The focused and uninterrupted time in the studio created new opportunities for her. Suddenly there was time to start projects that had been lingering and push her work in new directions. She took this time to take a long look into her past, while pushing her work into some new and somewhat familiar territory. Judy’s father was a Vice Admiral in the US Navy so her family moved frequently amongst bases along the east coast. Some of her happiest and most formative moments happened on and near the ocean. Sanctuary was inspired by those early memories. Even though it’s the newest work in the show (it was finished a few days before it arrived in Sioux City) Sanctuary has travelled the furthest in time because it connects with some of Judy’s earliest memories. Memories are fertile ground; there are always past experiences to draw on and extract meaning. The more personal the better. But, like mosaics, memories are fragmented. They’re put together from bits and pieces to create a semblance of what we have experienced.

Oyster Shells Teeth Real Femurs

It could be said that all matter is moving towards entropy, the inevitable and sometimes beautiful decline into chaos and disorder. Stars will die, mountains erode, and try
as we might, gravity will do what it’s going to do to our bodies. Memories, especially as we get older, are fragile but we expect more of them because they provide us with a narrative that gives structure to our lives. While we rely on memories to connect us to the earliest stage of our life, they are rarely accurate. That’s because we are essentially rewriting our history instead of recovering it. Nevertheless, what’s important to us, and what the works in the exhibition offer, is that we need access some semblance of our early lives to serve as a foundation for who we are, no matter how much these memories have been transformed in the process. If that foundation seems a little shaky, well, that’s because we’re human.

Judy Onofrio: Deep Dive. Sioux City Art Center, September 21, 2023 - February 11, 2024 and Minnesota Marine Art Museum, June 29, 2024 - January 5, 2025.

Exhibition brochure designed by Veto Design. Artwork and exhibition photography by Annick Sjobakken