The Los Angeles-based sculpture artist Ry Rocklen, known to create around the themes of health and spirituality, presents new work with the exhibit ‘Food Group‘ ~ his first exhibition with Team Gallery.
This new body of work consists of a 3D facsimile of a person wearing a food costume, created in the actual size of the specific cuisine. The foods are typical American fare ~ a hot dog named Brian, an ice cream cone named Jackie, each figure a real friend or colleague of the artist.
“The exhibition makes explicitly evident Rocklen’s interest in the confabulation of so-called high and low culture. Like his Pop Art forbearers, the artist places quotidian, often commercial forms into the stately, aggrandizing context of fine art. Mining the familiar visual culture of the American middle class, he neither lampoons nor elevates his subject matter, instead enacting a subtle cultural leveling. Even his modes of display seek to undermine these hierarchies: each work in this show is displayed on a foam-milled facsimile of a cheap paper plate, placed atop a dedicated pedestal. These works are reproductions of pre-existing objects in a new material; this aspect of their process highlights the alchemical nature of his work, and the transfigurative possibilities of art-making at large.”
Food Group by Ry Rocklen will be on view to November 4, 2017 at Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, NYC. Follow Team Gallery on Facebook.
