Archive Project 15: Jason Rogenes

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The Project Series
Project 15: Jason Rogenes

Jason Rogenes' installation, project 9.03g, and its accompanying catalogue reflect the artist's provocative take on life at the beginning of the 21st century. For the last seven years, Rogenes, who works in Los Angeles and New York, has been producing art that incorporates post-consumer waste—the material we typically throw away, such as Styrofoam, cardboard, tape, etc. He uses these non-traditional media in a body of work that explores popular culture and consumerism and that contrasts a high-tech aesthetic with low-tech packing materials. Rogenes transforms found waste and everyday material into sculptures and installations that address issues of monumental scale, visual complexity, and playful exploration. Combining ideas of industrialization and space technology with a sense of fantasy and wonder, Rogenes creates sophisticated accumulations that resonate within the cultural environment of Southern California as well as within the broader contemporary critical debate.

The artist’s creative process reflects a more humble approach to sculptural materials than the traditional modernist view of sculpture as a solid, unified object. Moving beyond the purely formal, Rogenes employs a handmade aesthetic that begins with his collecting of cast off materials, continues in the intuitive process of carving and gluing the cardboard and the Styrofoam, and culminates in the careful balance of glowing white Styrofoam sculptures nestled in cardboard caves. This transformation of the spaces his work inhabits results in a dramatic exploration of scale and a blurring of the boundaries between sculpture and architecture.

Jason Rogenes’ exhibition was the fifteenth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator