Justin Cloud at Below Grand

Artist: Justin Cloud

Exhibition title: Crude

Curated by: Andrew Woolbright

Venue: Below Grand, New York, US

Date: February 18 – Mach 25, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Below Grand, New York

The protagonist of the manga Berserk is Guts, a cursed mercenary, whose body has been rendered into a strange engram of loss and improvised prosthesis. He is marked by the Brand of Fate, which allows him to step out into the interstice, a place beyond the physical world that allows him to briefly see the flickering streams of causality and fate. He purposely puts himself in harm’s way as a method of finding his own meaning and purpose, ultimately resisting his destiny of tragedy by digging in, countering loss with a sublime romantic rage. It is an allegory for both Justin Cloud and the increasingly exiled way of the sculptor.

Cloud has left the Garden, his previous body of work, to explore the brutality of a new medieval age. He has exchanged flocking for repousse and chasing, ancient Medieval techniques for forging and sacralizing armor. The classical human period, the in illo tempore that Cloud addressed through heartbroken forms of alienation during the Covid lockdown, has been replaced by a new epoch; a meditation on brutality explored within the new Medieval society. In the periphery is the crying of the Virgin Mary articulated within the automata of Weeping Statues, along with possible suggestions of stigmata and a corporeal sense of pain and redemption straight from the writings of St. Augustine. The Gothic produces emo as its bathotic shadow, and both prove to be interesting.

Justin Cloud (b. 1987 Houston, TX) is a visual artist from a family of farmers, mechanics, and engineers.Derived from his experiences as an automotive technician with Ford, Cloud’s work often references machinery and automation by way of its contemporary relation with nature. In 2015, He moved from Wyoming to NYC, receiving his MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2018. His work has been shown nationally and has been included in recent exhibitions with Projet Pangee, Kravets Wehby, LTD LA, Frederic Snitzer Gallery, and Thierry Goldberg. He has been featured in ArtMaze Mag, Brooklyn Rail, Art News, and Daily Lazy among other publications. Justin Cloud currently lives and works in New York. This is his first solo show with the gallery.