Archive Project 15: Jason Rogenes

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Julie Joyce's Essay

Jason Rogenes' sculptures and installations conjure a phantom architecture. Constructed from mundane materials, the result of his Styrofoam, polystyrene, cardboard, and neon-lit conglomerations is an aesthetic that exists in the atmosphere far above and beyond Earth. His works appear as fantastical interplanetary vehicles, space stations, and peculiar contraptions that seem less like sculpture than something designed by NASA. What is most engaging about Rogenes' objects and environments, however, is not just the artist's strange vision of what lies ahead in terms of technology and navigation, but his work's manifold references to history. For these sculptures not only predict the future, but, perhaps more poignantly, critique the future of the past.

Our collective fascination with outer space, although now waning as quickly as the national budget spreads thin, was at an all-time fever pitch from the 1960s through the 1980s. Think of grammar school field trips to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Museum of Science and Industry, and the seemingly countless launches at Cape Canaveral. The message for any late baby boomer was this: We would be traveling freely into the outer atmosphere in our lifetime. Rogenes' work, a product of postmodernism and the post-Challenger generation, convincingly suggests that, in the end, the future has become more engaging through visions of the past than from those of the present.

Through their adept dynamics between the microcosmic and macrocosmic, Rogenes' complex, dramatically-lit reliefs, on the planet commonly known as Hollywood, might pass for elaborate sci-fi film sets. Standing in front of one of the artist's installations may easily remind one of Stanley Kubrick's "2001 a Space Odyssey" (1968) or Douglas Trumbull's "Silent Running" (1972) (actually, the special effects of both were produced by the accomplished Trumbull). From a distance Rogenes' work appears, like many of the instruments and environments in these films, neat and precise, high-tech and meticulous. Up close, similar to viewing a "behind the scenes" documentary of a major motion picture (or even one of those Los Angeles Times spots that run between movie previews), the scene disintegrates into what it actually is: budget items and detritus arranged to masterful effects.

The significance of Rogenes' work lies within a broader discussion of progress and the myth of utopia, or, perhaps, the schism that is the result of the utopic/dystopic shift ever present within contemporary society. Rogenes' works imparts the same nostalgia found in works by classic science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, thinkers that make us long for the days of actually believing that the future was full of the promises of flying cars and teleporting. However, Rogenes' use of the discarded trappings of consumer society—not even products themselves but the containers used to protect the products during transport—is even closer to the images so vividly detailed in the cyberpunk writings of William Gibson or Neil Stephenson. Like these authors, Rogenes participates wholeheartedly in concepts of bricolage, adaptive reuse, and random clustering—ideas symptomatic of a condition that is postmodern, if not simply defined by failure.

Remaining consistent throughout Rogenes' work is a type of agglomeration, an accumulation that achieves critical mass until a shift of scale occurs. The dynamics of this shift provoke an ambiguity of scale that make the artist's constructions seem impossibly large while at the same time infinitesimally small. Caught up within this dynamic, the viewer is led to believe that he or she is seeing something that isn't really there. This is not an unfamiliar strategy in art: the relief constructions of Lee Bontecou, an early progenitor of sci-fi related work, would be a fitting example in this case. Yet it is also the model in which technology thrives, a spectral presence of need with no real use other than the empty continuation of itself.

Similar to this solipsistic end game of illusions and unfulfilled desire, and much like our attempts at existing within the machinations of a consumer-based society, there is a frustration that Rogenes' work conveys. This unsettling feeling seems to grow even as his work shifts from particulars to something that resembles more of a composite landscape, with tall columns rising up into the air, stretching, potentially endlessly, without any ordinarily conceivable purpose. Less like traditional systems of support than the electrical transmitters, cellular antennae, and media towers that propagate rapidly across our 21st-century landscape, these are not only forms on which we have come to rely, but forms that we cannot help but build. As encountered through the peculiar imagination of Jason Rogenes, ours is a considerable fate to behold.

Julie Joyce