Five Churches in a Strip Mall on Pasadena Avenue is pleased to present ‘Seated Ducks’, an exhibition of oil pastel drawings and sculptures by Luke Rogers.
Rogers’s practice investigates sites of energetic transfer. He has depicted gas flames, aqueducts, metal-bending machinery, glimpses into open refrigerators – the metabolics of domestic and industrial infrastructure. His objects are tough, but Rogers erodes that toughness through muffled rendering and dialed-up contrast, to the point where his pictures feel hypnotic, experiential, as if they were taken with a home-made camera. In spending time with the works, one might begin to see the torqued metal glisten, hear the hiss of escaping gas, or the trickle of water.
Perspective shifts are important to Rogers: moving the viewer to think of a stovetop as a landscape rather than a still life, or showing a miniature replica of a car seat that asks them to consider their own body in relation to it. There are four of these tiny car seats arranged around the perimeter of the space. They are made of carved foam covered in wax, resin and pigment. Empty vessels, they suggest the human figure through its absence – they are a false invitation for the viewer to about face and redirect their point of view towards the gallery.
As this exhibition’s title suggests, it introduces a new body of work made up of drawings and sculptures of ducks. Specifically, their bellies and feet, as seen looking up from underneath the water’s surface. The sculptures, installed under the space’s ceiling, originated from a childhood memory of a carved duck in Rogers’s grandfather’s house, in which he would try to find the top half of the duck in an upstairs room. Not only do these works suggest architecture beyond the space they inhabit, but they are also a way for Rogers to provide a second, more genuine invitation to the viewer: to position themselves vis-à-vis the ducks’ most vulnerable part, negotiating sympathy and voyeurism.
Luke Rogers (b. 1989) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. His work has been supported by the Al Held Foundation’s fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2014) and the Fondation des États-Unis’ Harriet Hale Woolley fellowship in Paris, FR (2015-2016). His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at as-is (Los Angeles, CA), Bozo Mag (Los Angeles, CA) Guererro Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Harkawik (New York, NY), Radical Abacus (Santa Fe, NM), and Able Baker (Portland, ME). He has held recent solo exhibitions at Moskowitz Bayse (Los Angeles), Galerie Timonier (New York, NY), as-is (Los Angeles, CA), The Bunker (Malibu, CA) and the Fondation des États-Unis (Paris, FR). Rogers received an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from Boston University College of Fine Art.