JERRY SPAGNOLI

JERRY SPAGNOLI /// LOCAL STORIES

“Local Stories” is the title for the latest project. It is a rough translation for the idea of “petit ecrits” put forward by Lyotard as an alternative to the grand historical narratives generally promoted by society; the story of great men, and their great deeds. From my point of view the real experience of history is a personal one. Everything else is a fiction promoted or accepted for all sorts of good or bad reasons. Ultimately the only thing you can know is what you have proximity to, and even that is a construct of your own personal fictions (but at least they are yours). Every person on earth is a container of a history, possessing their own experiences and memories, and all of these histories jostle with one another, resisting and accommodating, in an endless flow, never reaching a consensus but constantly moving on. In order to represent this state I utilize a wide lens, seeking to gather as much of what is in front of me into the frame. The effect I’m after is the visual impression that the whole world is included, and in that view everybody is preoccupied with their own life, in the midst of others. The surface of the earth is a grand bazaar of life, every individual in open exchange with others, and with their own sense of themselves. It’s an ephemeral state. The only constant is its mutability, but there is always a center which holds it all together, the pivot around which all of this must necessarily gravitate and to suggest this point I placed the sun in the center of each image.

  The idea underlying this project is that history is what occurs everywhere, all the time, all at once. It’s all connected, of course, in deep or superficial ways, but the hierarchies we have grown accustomed to are a fiction. The persistence of the idea of history as “the story of great men” (or women for that matter ), a singular narrative which excludes “extraneous” stories, robs individuals of the awareness of their own roles in the day to day creation of the world. In fact, for each individual, nothing really exists except the situation within which they find themselves. You can’t interact with anything in the world unless you have some sort of proximity to it. 


 These images are a metaphor for the democratization of the history of the world: they are general in viewpoint, diffuse in subject, and the only constant is the thing surely there from before the beginning and certain to be there after the end, the sun in the center of the sky.


  ☁ JERRY SPAGNOLI

TERRY RODGERS

TERRY RODGERS has acquired considerable fame as the creator of large-scale cinematic paintings that compel the viewer to participate in a disenchanted world where beauty, sex and money do not seem to bring happiness. They evoke the confusing energy, decadence, desire, loneliness and promise of an age. He portrays a contemporary search for a meaningful life as a perpetual existential hangover.

Rodgers makes clear that this 21st century jet-set notion of success is but a metaphor. It is the various modes of language and perception of every era or culture that are the inevitable roots of illusion, and often disenchantment. Rodgers' works underline the complexity of human relations in contemporary society, with all its contradictions and mediated influences.

On a more abstract level, his works concern his fascination with the dialectic coalescence of contradictory impulses in a subjective perspective.


☁ TERRY RODGERS
☁ TERRY RODGERS @ THE TORCH

CHRISTY LEE ROGERS

CHRISTY LEE ROGERS grew up in a family of musicians in the small beach town of Kailua, Hawaii on Oahu’s windward coast. She is a self-taught photographer, indie-filmmaker, poet and lyricist. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Kailua, Hawaii.


☁ CHRISTY LEE ROGERS

TERESA REICHERT

TERESA REICHERT /// TYPEWRITER

☁ TERESA REICHERT

SUZANNE JONGMANS

SUZANNE JONGMANS /// STATEMENT


Referring to both vulnerability and impermanence, I am investigating the texture and feel of both the present and past. Since 2007 I have been working on the series 'foam sculptures': caps and collars, inspired by 16th and 17th century paintings, made from materials currently used for packaging and insulation. This is also an inferior material which is often discarded after use.
By using this material I make a reference to consumerism and the rapid circulation of materials. With these foam sculptures, but also an i-pod, a tattoo and a foot in plaster, we end up in the 21st century.

The portraits are a certain reference to Holbein, Clouet, Vermeer and Holland's Golden Age.
It is no coincidence. In fact, in the 16th and 17th century, laid the foundations for photography.
Call it the prehistory of photography. It appears that the artists have used photographic images, they could not yet capture. In fact, there was the phenomenon of photography so much earlier. This is an atavism of the Golden Age and the early days of the invention of photography.

I use the elements in the present as in the past, the objects in my work are used as symbols
of values. I mutate old costumes into new plastics and old masters in new photographic works.
By using time foreign materials, plastics and techno's, I am creating a time crux, a tension of time.



☁ SUZANNE JONGMANS