Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Jud Bergeron titled After context on view from September 3 to October 25, 2025. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment.

In the exhibition After context, Jud Bergeron explores the ways in which form, material, and process function as sculptural prompts--each one opening a new rabbit hole of context and meaning. Bergeron's project is in part a response to the behavior of artificial intelligence, where a single prompt can generate a cascade of divergent outcomes. The artist is using the same principle in physical space: letting materials and their demands lead the direction of the work. Rather than issuing commands to a machine, he is asking questions of matter.

At the heart of the show is a recurring form Bergeron calls the "hero," originating in 2017 with a piece titled Demon Dog. Initially built from polygons and card stock, the form was scanned, 3D printed, and eventually translated into materials ranging from resin to bronze. For After Context, he took the digital file of Demon Dog, inflated its polygonal planes, and enlarged the whole. The resulting volume had to be split into nine sections for 3D printing--components that are usually reunited into a seamless whole. Instead, the artist became intrigued by each fragment as an autonomous object, each one an opportunity for re-contextualization.

Bergeron molded and cast the pieces in a range of materials--ceramic, hydrocal, bronze--each with distinct limitations and aesthetic voices. Ceramics shrank unpredictably and couldn’t be mechanically joined, so he built wooden structures to support and contain their flatness. Hydrocal’s fragility required internal steel armatures and coats of resin to bind the forms. Bronze, dense and unforgiving, had to be arranged so as not to crush the more delicate elements. The choreography of these interactions became as vital as the objects themselves.

"No final form was preconceived," says Bergeron. "Each sculpture emerged from its own internal logic, driven by the material's resistance, possibility, and necessity. By reimagining and re-contextualizing the same foundational form, I’m engaging the visual language of sculpture as a kind of dialect--one that evolves through repetition, mutation, and disruption. Each iteration becomes a new sentence in an ongoing conversation with the original model, altered by every material and every process that reshapes it."

Jud Bergeron lives and works in San Francisco, California. Born in 1972 in Winslow, Arizona, Bergeron trained classically at the Old Lyme Academy of Fine Art in Connecticut. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in cities including New York, London, and Lyon. His art has recently been shown at the de Young Museum and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, and Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bergeron is the co-founder and executive director of The Space Program SF, an artist in residency program in San Francisco.

After context is Jud Bergeron's third solo exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.