Will Rogan “ruin”

September 28 mon - October 25 sun

Opening reception : September 28 18:00 - 20:00

Misako & Rosen is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition in Japan ofartist Will Rogan.
Born in 1975 in Highland Park, Illinois, Rogan receivedhis MFA from the University of California Berkeley in 2006 and presentlylives and works in Albany, California. In 2007, Rogan’s work was presnetd inTokyo in both a two-person exhibition at Misako & Rosen – with artist YukiOkumura – and the group exhibition, “All About Laughter: Humor inContemporary Art” at the Mori Art Museum. A selection of Rogan’sinternational solo and group exhibiton venues includes Small A Projects, New York (2009), Diverse Works, Houston (2007), the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2005), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center forthe Arts, San Francisco (2003). Additionally, Rogan is the co-founder /co-editor of The Thing Quarterly, an object-based quarterly publication.

At the foundation of Will Rogan’s practice is a modesty unique within thefield of contemporary art. A consequence of this modesty is the multi-medianature of his oeuvre – exhibitions typically consisting of works executed infilm, photography, sculpture and on paper with no apparent hierarchy orimportance allotted to a specific media. In apparent contradiction to thisabundance of material is the seeming ease with which Rogan creates withoutadding things to the world. Sharing both post-conceptualismユs sense of humoras well as, to some extent, a notion of classical conceptualdematerialization, Rogan primarily relies upon the everyday to providematerial of wonder. Casually placed objects and signs are photographed withan eye focused on their inherent contextual strangeness, artists’ tools,particularly the camera, become unfamiliar when, self referentially, they focus back upon themselves in a related media and incongruous actions manageto retain their incongruity when orchestrated and documented by Rogan.
An economy of means becomes an abundance in Rogan’s work as an engagement with the quotidian serves as the foundation for his practice.