The Brooklyn Rail

GRAY’s Judy Ledgerwood: Twilight in the Wilderness includes four large-scale oil paintings and one acrylic gouache on paper. The exhibition title refers to landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church’s 1860 painting of the same name, which stages a layered collision of mid-altitude altocumulus clouds and a warm beam break of lemon light folding over a filament of mountains. Ledgerwood’s body of work is thematically anchored in the oxblood and claret light rays refracting before eventide so pleasantly illustrated in Church’s work. In Alpen Glow, Crepuscolo, Golden Hour (all 2025), and Tangerine & Magenta (2024), Ledgerwood purifies the muted plum and maroon palettes glossing Church’s naturalist imagery, keying it into flat neon hues. Modulated into even-toned raspberry, damson, cerise, and fuchsia blends, Ledgerwood partitions her colors within ornamental quatrefoils. There is no remnant of the landscape left in Vitamin C (2025), where four-lobed petal crosses are shaped through verdigris axes that trace and bisect the tangerine background. With the alpine imagery negated, so too does the concomitant beauty perish. Ledgerwood’s uneven clover sequences pool and bulge at their meeting points, gold occasionally spilling over into the canvas’s white lower edges. In Golden Hour and Alpen Glow, the quatrefoil motifs are divided into triangular parcels in electric indigo, ultramarine, violet, and cobalt; the petal crosses are boldly outlined with a crème-impasto texture that gleams like plastic. In the paintings’ bottom margins, purple streaks and pink runs cascade downwards.

Helen Molesworth, who has written an essay in the exhibition catalogue, characterizes Ledgerwood’s work as markedly feminist. Molesworth claims that while Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann similarly work with saturated palettes, Ledgerwood eschews the geometrical forms they favor. Molesworth argues that Ledgerwood’s putative “patterns” fruitfully engage with the Pattern & Decoration tradition, with clustered circles and grid-wrapped flowers “wrapping … entire walls and whole rooms,” their “unabashedly decorative, pattern-based mark-making” suggesting modes of labor traditionally associated with women, including quilting, embroidery, tapestry, and appliqué. Although such references do partially inform the meaning of Ledgerwood’s work, it strikes me as unwarranted to claim that her paintings lionize the decorative tradition. Ledgerwood’s paintings, limned in heavy-handed and even vulgar palettes, are at odds with veneration. Nor, given their painterliness, with many of Ledgerwood’s lines encrusted in built-up and uneven surface texture, can one claim that they critique or subversively appropriate the decorative, which consists in beautification.

Clarifying what Ledgerwood’s works are about requires finer engagement with the notion of the visual pattern and how it relates to the artist’s use of color. In Mána Taylor’s review of Ledgerwood’s 2023 exhibition at Denny Gallery, Sunny, the author notes that Ledgerwood’s “work began as an exploration of colorful hues, but she shifted to pattern-making when she felt that what she was painting was too beautiful. She told me that she now embraces the clash between beauty and vulgarity and strives for disruptions.” Indeed, it is via vulgarity that Ledgerwood distinguishes her work from seamlessly pattern-plotted decorative objects, such as quilts and afghans, and the artworks, such as those produced by the Pattern & Decoration movement, that were directly inspired by such objects. In their tawdry neon hues, Ledgerwood’s quatrefoils and skewed tessellations are incongruent to Joyce Kozloff’s and Valerie Jaudon’s exacting ornamentations or Miriam Schapiro’s sensuous “femmages.”

Ledgerwood’s work brings to bear a deceptively simple question: when does a pattern fail to be a pattern? To fail to be a pattern is quite distinct from not being a pattern at all. The latter description predicates all non-patterns. To be identifiable as a representation that fails to be a pattern, the image must possess something identifiably pattern-like. That is, there must be a recurrent motif. Indeed, Ledgerwood’s work is rife with recurrent motifs—chiefly, her quatrefoils. Their falling short of a coalesced pattern has little to do with Ledgerwood’s use of lurid hues. Rather, the failure consists in the quatrefoils’ uneven, clanging petals, which together evade the contrivance required for even, mechanical, or machine-like spacing.

Ledgerwood’s works demonstrate that while the repetition of one or several motifs might be a necessary condition for producing a pattern, it is not a sufficient condition. In her 1975 “Patterns, Grids, and Painting,” Amy Goldin perspicaciously identified that the “crucial determinant of pattern is the constancy of the interval between motifs,” as evinced by the coincidental pattern(s) that transpire when one “preserve[s] the spacing between sequences of [type-written] letters.” Goldin contrasted this to “a single motif, like a rubber stamp,” which, when “irregularly applied to a sheet of paper does not yield any sort of pattern at all.” Ledgerwood’s skewed sequences hew closer to the latter category: an irregularly produced concatenation. Antecedent artists like Cynthia Carlson have similarly engaged with the boundaries of pattern-making, but their errant forms were significantly more regular than Ledgerwood’s. Ledgerwood’s canvases teem with sporadically stamped flower-shaped incisions that enjoy only a provisional likeness. They are strung together such that there is a degree—but only a degree—of regularity to their course. By interrupting and dispersing her forms into swollen and deflated variants, Ledgerwood effaces the punctuated gaps mandated by a pattern, proper.

Homing in on Ledgerwood’s use of color, we find that unlike her forms, it is endowed with significant regularity. Indeed, in both her backgrounds and her alternating, colored semé of distended trefoils, Ledgerwood’s brassy palettes are standardized. Golden Hour and Alpen Glow’s backgrounds are constructed with evenly distanced neon blue, purple, and pink tracts. As the most successful two works in the show, these works make the pattern/failure-of-a-pattern dichotomy evident through the placement of irregularly outlined forms upon regularly sequenced, mosaic-like colored backgrounds. Bereft of strict regularity, the palettes become standalone optical devices. This explains why Ledgerwood takes such care to render pronounced and garish tones. At times, as in Crepuscolo, Ledgerwood’s use of color is a bit too restrained for her project. But where her color grows garish and her awry forms are posited along a sequenced background, her paintings are quite effective. It is in these works where Ledgerwood most fruitfully engages with the question of why, exactly, these would-be patterns (intentionally) fail to be patterns.