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FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Will
Rogan
New
Problems
October 29 – December 19,
2010
Opening reception Friday, October 29, 6 –
8pm
Laurel Gitlen is pleased to announce New Problems, an exhibition of
new work
by
San Francisco artist Will Rogan. Â Rogan’s second solo exhibition at the
gallery will include new photographs, works on paper, video, and sculpture that
consider the predicament of time as both a continuous present and as discrete
moments suspended by the
camera.
Rogan’s work is primarily concerned with the passage of time and the
profound and mundane practices of seeing, believing and preserving images.Â
This new body of work centers on the inextricable equation of filmic media with
time and light in a series of black and white photographs taken over specific
intervals. Two nearly identical images of prisms, Day and
Night, were made twelve hours apart — one at noon, the other at
midnight. Other paired photographs depict the same image of a book or a girl
walking in the woods, taken just seconds apart. These doubled images
foreground the inverse relationship of light and time as joined elements in the
mechanics of the camera, while slowing movement to make visible the innumerable
views that continuously unfold before us in the
present.
Rogan’s photographs are both a depiction of something and the thing
itself, simultaneously referencing their place in the world as objects and as
images. Three photographs of H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time
Machine, show a first-edition copy worn from years of library use. Nearly
identical images of the cover are distinguished by a scratch in the negative,
drawing attention to the physical process of producing the photographic print.
Dappled light cuts diagonally across the book, its physical presence appearing
as solid as the hardbound text. The repetition of these photographs and
imagery within Rogan’s work is itself akin to poetry, where recurrence
suggests both metaphors and language. Moreover, objects in the photographs
— prisms, a jacket printed with an image of a world map, a printed clock
on a t-shirt, a book — are simple things in the world but also devices for
understanding space, light and
time.
Also included in the exhibition are two works from an ongoing series of erased
magazine pages. These works, made from the original pages of a 1970’s
magicians’ trade magazine, MUM, initially elicit a sense of
nostalgia. However, the materiality of the page is foregrounded; the act of
disappearing an image is a physical removal of ink from the printed page.Â
Mirroring the invisibility of the photographer, the magician becomes a stand-in
for the artist who has the capacity to make things appear or to render them
invisible. Here also, the camera and the photographic image become quiet
reminders of
mortality.
Will Rogan’s work is included in the California Biennial at the Orange
County Museum of Art and has been exhibited widely, including recent exhibitions
at SFMoMA; the Berkeley Art Museum; BE-PART Platform voor Actuele Kunst,
Waregem, Belgium; The Mercer Art Union, Toronto; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and
solo gallery exhibitions at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, and Misako & Rosen,
Tokyo. A new body of work made in collaboration with Lauren Mckeon will be
exhibited in Present Future at the Artissima art fair in Turin, Italy,
November
2010.
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