Sunday 28 March 2010

Will Rogan | Remant World

Will Rogan Life Removed 1, 2008 erased magazine page. 12 x 10 inches

The camera — as the artist’s tool, as a physical object, and as a metaphor for mortality – is at the heart of these recent works. Aligned around a tension between absence and presence, Rogan seeks to identify the vanishing point that haunts the instantaneous present. As in earlier bodies of work, these pieces address a series of related, but tangential ideas expressed in different media.

In several works, visual information is obscured, diffused, refracted or omitted, complicating modes of perception and undermining conventions for image-making. In Collapse, a video depicts a woman on the back of driving through the streets of Tokyo holding a mirror so that the immediate past and the immediate future are visible on one plane. video is projected on a sculpture that mirrors the shape of light projector and rests on a piece of rubble from the gallery renovation. In another, a dangling bulb emits an intense light refracted through a chaotic cluster of glass prisms; the orb resembles a glowing celestial body, a sloppy chandelier that is captivating but blinding. And in a small group of works on paper, magazine pages are manipulated until all information except an image of a camera is erased or concealed.

Humor, and in particular the humor of everyday idiosyncrasy, is central to Rogan’s work. The title, Remnant World, is drawn from a series of small black and white photographs — Other Worlds —that plainly depict overly specialized but generic stores that assert themselves as comprehensive outlets for the consumer or connoisseur. These shops (Smoker’s World, Vacuum World, Popcorn World, etc) offer inelegant declarations of wholeness and suspect grandiosity. As an index, Remnant World registers certain limitations: the fragmented nature of perception and the impossibility of omniscient experience. Literally, it refers to a black and white image of a place to buy cheap carpets.

Rihanna | Rude Boy dir. Melina Matsoukas

Thursday 18 March 2010

Studio Visit | Ryan McGinley from the NYTimes

Larson F, 2010, gelatin silver print, 18 x 13.5 inches, edition of three

Ryan McGinley knows from adolescence. As the chronicler of (usually naked) misspent youth, the 32-year-old photographer has made a not-insignificant career out of capturing and exalting this most evanescent of states. T dropped by McGinley’s Chinatown HQ for a sneak peek of “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” his new exhibition of black-and-white nudes, which opens tonight at the Team Gallery in SoHo.
Q.
Your last project, ”Moonmilk,” or the Cave project as it was better known, was such a radical departure for you in many ways, and this new show is certainly not what I was expecting. Unlike ”Moonmilk,” in which you pulled so far away and the nudes blended into the environment, here the black-and-white images are very up-close, and very old-school glamorous for you.

David Salle

Private collection, London/Courtesy Haunch of Venison New York
David Salle, “Cold Child (George Trow),” 1986.