Ry Rocklen

Ry Rocklen @ Parker Jones

September 9 – October 25 , 2009

Ry Rocklen's show closed Sunday at Parker Jones in Los Angeles.  It’s Rocklen’s first solo show in Los Angeles since his appearance in the Whitney Biennial in 2008.  The title of the show, “The House of Return” makes reference to his returning to Los Angeles his hometown to work and create a home.  Rocklen’s show presents an image of a gritty Los Angeles home life and all of its banalities.

Rocklen’s works at Parker Jones are composed of rarified street detritus presented as sculptural forms. The gallery floor is covered with faded carpet remnants locked together in a vaguely tessellated grid. The carpet has a crudely abbreviated marquetry effect on the floor. Elegantly slumped on top of the carpeted floor and directly facing the entryway to the gallery is a mattress. As a pneumatic form it's hard to miss the mattress as provocateur. The magic here is not necessarily in the subject but the emotive content of the subject implied via glittering tiles elegantly placed in precise stripes on the surface. Subtle and perfectly aligned it's easy to misunderstand this piece in reproduction. Its seductiveness relies heavily on its ability to transform itself into a visual prostitute of sorts putting its best face on for our entertainment.

Because these pieces were found and preserved by Rocklen they bring to mind a populist notion of the "street" and an artist's contemporary responsibility to relate to the practice of everyday life. There is a lot more going on in Rocklen's pieces than the romanticism and marketing behind urban images. Rocklen invokes the history of art in playful and witty ways with ordinary junk. He has created a tableau of objects arranged almost as the characters from Manet’s, “Luncheon in the Grass”. The fake grass carpet and reclining nude mattress create a current context for aesthetic meditation parallel to the one that Manet implied.  However, instead of revealing a simple straightforward recognition of human sexuality and naturalism, Rocklen seems to imply that our exterior experience is supposed to be more at ease than this. The fact that our societal experience is neither natural nor easy alludes to an unstable interior world removed from the slick artifice of contemporary life. .

The strategy that Rocklen utilizes is a synectic one that simply asks each found object to play against its type. A crushed sweatshirt dulled by sidewalk rigor mortise is revivified by a bronze surface. His sculptures have been compared to Duchamp because of their associations with the, "readymade". However I find them to be completely antithetical to the Duchampian strategy in the sense that Rocklen doesn't see his found objects as complete in and of themselves. His interventions animate the pieces and bring to life an interior dialogue that is simultaneously smart, playful and tragic.

-Mary Anna Pomonis