Nick Barbee Marfacello (JefferJudd)

Marfacello (JefferJudd) is an examination of space and memory. To start, I made a comparison between Thomas Jefferson and Donald Judd. Specifically, I considered the house museums dedicated to preserving their history, Monticello and Marfa, TX. Each home is decorated with maps, tinkerings, and ideas that create an air of ingenuity around their historic tenant.

Using Jefferson and Judd (and Monticello and Marfa) as a trailhead, this body of work examines space and memory, history and landscape. I’ve designed my own tools, each for specific, if unintelligible task.

Using maps created by both Jefferson and Judd, I’ve created maps that absent of any legend, read as abstract paintings. Marfacello (JefferJudd) embraces the myopia of its namesakes. The work plays at inventiveness and ingenuity by proposing solutions to nonexistent problems.