Will Rogan. Erase, 2014; still from video, silent; 8:10. Courtesy of the Artist, Altman
Siegel, San Francisco; and Laurel Gitlen, New York.

Viewing Will Rogan’s MATRIX show at the Berkeley Art Museum leaves one with a lingering impression of something that can only be described, somewhat paradoxically, as homely elegance. Rogan’s quiet yet extraordinarily powerful evocations of time—how one experiences its passage, quickly and slowly, or simply observes its arbitrary nature—manage to embody both of these qualities in their sparing installation throughout the odd, liminal space allotted to MATRIX exhibitions. The show’s centerpiece, literally and figuratively, is Seven (2014), a small, ceramic, staircase-shaped sculpture festooned with seven handmade “melting” brass clock faces à la Salvador Dali. This sly, slightly louche historical reference is enchanting—especially when made by a conceptualist of Rogan’s caliber and intelligence. It is a deliberate move, a deadpan sleight of hand and eye that Rogan’s work as a whole invokes through both temporal and spatial manipulation.

Three black-and-white photographs, one on each wall, triangulate the gallery space. Two of them, both titled Scout’s Ruler and dating from 2013, were printed from the same negative and show his daughter’s homemade ruler with numbers written right to left—a result of her dyslexia. The punch line is that the prints are different sizes but hung far enough from each other that this shift in scale, not immediately apparent, begins to suggest a magic act. (Rogan’s artist’s book of magician’s obituaries, Broken Wands [2014], sits on a shelf in the gallery, hinting at such a reading.) The third photograph, Picture of the Earth Spinning in Space (2014), features a rotated manhole cover, and is a version of a color picture featured in Rogan’s first museum show ten years ago as a SECA award winner at SFMOMA. It, too, is a kind of measure of time, simultaneously marking movement forward and backward; it suggests both “development” (a kind of photographic in-joke?) and the retrograde implication of going from color to black-and-white, rather than the other way around.

The pièce de résistance of the show is Eraser (2014), a video of an exploding hearse shot with a special camera that takes 6,900 frames per second. Four seconds of “real” time become nearly six minutes of smoke and car parts that move, with the exquisite slowness of Butoh dancers, through a wintry landscape. It is a gift to be able to experience the events at a crawl. You can watch it as many times as you like without ever exhausting the almost pornographic thrill of feeling the tyranny of time all but perfectly tamed, even if only for a few ecstatic moments.

Will Rogan: MATRIX 253 is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive through June 9, 2014.

Maria Porges is an artist and writer whose critical writing has appeared in many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, Glass, and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. An Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts, she likes to topiarize unsuspecting shrubbery and read out loud.

Will Rogan. Mediums 4 (II), 2010; paper, wood, beeswax; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco

Stay Home, Will Rogan’s current exhibition at Altman Siegel Gallery, tantalizingly suggests the balance that sometimes must be struck between visual information and conceptual intent. The gelatin silver prints and small sculptures on view examine loss and obsolescence and the futile attempt to stem off either over time. They create a careful correspondence between photography’s presumed capacity to preserve and a magician’s feigned control over the material world—his ability to make an object disappear at will. The exhibition itself is an exercise in illusion—a reverse sleight of hand in which we are presented with absence and must conjure what is missing.

Read the full article here.

Will Rogan, Cradle to grave (1), 2013; wood, paint, brass, 12.63 x 12.5 x 1.25 in. Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

In Rogan’s sculptural works Cradle to the grave (1) (2013) and Cradle to the grave (2) (2013), his deliberate use of geometry creates an illusion bound not by time but by the viewer’s imagination. Perfectly whittled, stained wooden segments, each around the size of a standard wooden ruler, intersect and join in variously angled vertices. A clock face laid across one of the wooden sections bends across it, a clear reference to Salvador Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory (1931). While Dalí’s clocks have become almost trite, Rogan’s versions effectively evoke the feeling of losing one’s memory—it slowly slips away, eluding our grasp. These poetic, minimal works give tangible form to the voids in our thought patterns. Though these pieces appear effortlessly put together, a close examination reveals their thoughtful construction. Rogan’s sculptures speak to the silences between words, those quiet segments of life rarely explored in our fast paced, cut-and-paste culture: the moments in between status updates, before the finger swipes against a device.

Will Rogan, Blanking Out, 2013 Installation view. Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

In direct conversation with the Cradle works are Rogan’s untitled mobile pieces. Suspended from the gallery ceiling, each of their elements—from triangular pieces of wood to painted prisms—hangs from translucent strings. The perspective constantly changes as one walks underneath and through these works. They do not stay still; their movements are barely perceptible but still significant. Rogan painted the top portions of each prism, creating a visual effect that mimics a pair of eyes unfocused in its gaze. Precarious and appearing to float magically above the viewer, these untitled works are constantly in flux. Each figure seems to represent a stanza to some forgotten poem, a word that has yet to be spoken, or a phrase on the cusp of enunciation. Much like poetry, Rogan’s meticulously constructed works are deliberate and require the viewer to ignite meaning between their components. Just as one reads and rereads a poem, it is possible to view these works multiple times and gain a different perspective at each turn. The spaces and lapses of time are emphasized as the viewer’s position and presence shifts.

Will Rogan, Double zero, 2013, Wood, paint, brass, 37 1/4 x 1 x 3/4 in. Detail view, Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

Simplicity and repetition formally unify Rogan’s works. In Double Zero (2013), we find a single domino balanced on top of a long, thin wooden stick. Delicately placed and perched, it looks to be on the verge of falling over, as though it could topple with the slightest movement. How is it balanced? The domino’s lack of numbers makes it a nonentity—a double nothingness—that draws our attention toward the total architecture of the space. Each piece calls out not only its presence but also the negative space it creates, contributing to a succinct visual language in which the spaces and voids between objects become just as important as the objects themselves.

Will Rogan, Untitled, 2013, Wood, paint, brass, string, beeswax, 64 x 120 x 54 in. Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

The title of the exhibition, Blanking Out, recalls a familiar phrase often used to discuss memory. Using subtle forms, Rogan constructs a variation between the spaces and the voids that we normally dismiss as absolute nothingness. There is something timeless, boundless, and symbiotic about their relationships. Simple in composition, the thoughtful works engage in direct conversation with the viewer, constantly moving and shifting, mimicking motion and thought. It is in the blank and negative spaces where we begin to understand the relationships between object and self. There we can perceive and interrogate the spaces between thought and action, as Rogan gives shape and form to the intangible.

Will Rogan’s exhibition Blanking Out was on view at Altman Siegal from February 21 – April 13, 2013. This author of this review is Dorothy Santos, contributing writer for DailyServing.com’s partnering site, Art Practical.

Will Rogan, "Busts," 2010, 6 altered magazine pages, 11 1/8 x 8 1/4 inches each; image courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, SF

In 1980, French theorist and critic Roland Barthes published the book Camera Lucida, addressing the nature of photography and its inherent relationship with the mechanics of time. Barthes deconstructs this correlation and the concept of memento mori, roughly translated to mean “remember your mortality,” and how photography exposes the vulnerable temporality of life. Will Rogan’s exhibition, Stay Home, now at the Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco, clearly roots itself in continuing this investigation.

Will Rogan, "The Elusive Nature of Time," 2010, Gelatin Silver Print, 16 x 20 inches; image courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, SF

The exhibition is comprised mainly of three separate series. The first is made up of photographs repurposing a book on the subject of time, originally published by Life Magazine Science Library in 1966. “The Elusive Nature of Time,” (2010) and “Man Versus Clock:  the Unequal Struggle,” (2010) are intriguing as Rogan gets close to actually documenting allusion. The layers that overlap within these images are palpable. The viewer experiences images of chapters of a then-relevant book, whose own memento mori has set in once the words hit the page, then captured by Rogan’s action of photographing the book, sealing its fate which was already determined at the minute it was conceptualized.

Will Rogan, "Mediums 4 (II)," 2010, paper, wood, beeswax, dimensions variable; image courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, SF

In works such as “Medium 4 (II),” (2010), Rogan implements hand-cut wood sculptures to reference this idea of temporality within an art career’s shelf-life. Rogan applies images of artists he has salvaged from discarded art catalogs encountered at the San Francisco Art Institute onto the pieces of wood, positions them without any adhesive, resulting in free-standing assemblages. What is to be inferred from these works? At one point, these artists were, quote unquote, important enough to have their picture taken. Yet, their catalogs have been discarded. Is Rogan suggesting that these photographs capture the peak and then eminent decline of the life of these artists’ career? It may seem a bit over-determined, however, what comes to mind are the various cultures, such as Native American or Aboriginal, who held the belief that having ones’ photograph taken left the soul in danger.

Will Rogan, "Can," 2010, Gelatin Silver Print, 16 x 20 inches; image courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery, SF

The final series of the exhibition is a body of photographs the artist took around the neighborhood he lives in and which the exhibition draws its title. The subject matter of this series is varied: a lone sneaker facing an indistinguishable wall; a discarded aluminum can emanating an iridescent light; a window pane that has been cracked in the shape of a teardrop and then outlined with duct tape in an attempt to fix the problem. These works are presented as Rogan’s attempt to capture what he considers outside found sculpture within the “urban and domestic landscapes around him.” There seems to be some implication that this series is a bit separate from the other two, and it isn’t quite clear why as they unequivocally fit within his investigation of the arc of time. Each individual subject serve as makeshift wormholes, leaving the viewer to imagine what happened in the ever-allusive past to lead up to its being captured on film—and its impending decline since the click of the shutter button.

Stay Home will be on view at Altman Siegel Gallery through November 6th, 2010.