MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication. In the series, Rogan alters the magazine’s pages by erasing the image of the magicians doing their tricks, leaving only the background of their performances on view. These contexts range from the more overtly staged scenario in Silencer #16 —the erased magician is about to perform a trick on his assistant trapped on an odd, almost dada looking box—to the more “colloquial” Silencer #17 in which the absent magician’s silhouette appears in what seems to be a children’s hospital. Rogan’s interventions attest to their own creation by way of the subtle marks and erasure used to remove the original visual information. Such evidence of the artist’s hand echoes the magician’s sleight-of-hand in the image and suggests the illusory character of all representation. By extension, the remaining white voids are uncanny, ghostly stand-ins for the performer and artist who both haunt the scene.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Will Rogan’s practice reflects the poignant, the ironic, the disastrous, and the beautiful in his surrounding urban and domestic landscapes. In the form of photography, video, and sculpture, his interventions often highlight the profound and analytical in everyday life. Taking a playful stance on mundane situations and structures, Rogan’s work merges the critical with the poetic. He is also the co-editor and founder of the quarterly journal of editions, The Thing .
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Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
The film Sometimes It Was Beautiful by Christian Nyampeta poetically addresses the systemic conditions leading and emerging from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which had lasting and profound effects on Rwanda and neighbouring countries like Congo...
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Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
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