Darryl Rogers with Dave Gough in front of their work at QVMAG. Picture: Supplied
JANUARY 9 2022
Launceston artist Darryl Rogers shares incredible achievements in industry, and what's next
A Launceston artist's already illustrious career has continued to take strides towards bigger and better things as 2022 gets underway.
Darryl Rogers started his art career at college and went into theatre, becoming an art director and set designer. Over 30 years, he learnt from some of the best in the industry.
"That sort of catapulted me into designing tourism attractions across Australia. There was major initiatives around that time that were spending a lot of money trying to get people to go into the outback," he said.
"We were using lots of technology. We were innovative by telling stories in quite dynamic ways using multiple screens, multiple projectors, using holograms, all sorts of things."
In the midst of all the work, Rogers realised his passion for being a filmmaker while he was creating television for SBS and ABC.
"Movie making was always sort of central to what I was interested in ... I was really keen and developing a real interest in telling stories through videos," he said.
"Now I make video art. My interest is trying to make video look like paintings. I try to use video in a way that's expressive."
So how did Rogers come to bring his talent to Tasmania? Well, the artist decided he wanted to revisit his roots as an artist and found himself thinking the island would be the place to do it.
After going back to university and completing several degrees, Rogers decided to commit to what he calls his art practice of video work.
The decision has led to the artist creating some incredible works for places like the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and working with some very talented artists.
"As part of my practice, I've actually formed a relationship with a couple of other guys ... and we created a group called Soma Lumia - a tech art collective," Rogers said.
The team has worked with Mona Foma over the past three years to create works such as a VR experience of the Tarkine rainforest, a video art laser experience at the Penny Royal, and a responsive work where the participant could dance in real time with others located in different areas.
"[For Mona Foma 2022] we were asked to collaborate with pakana kanaplila, Tasdance, and others to bring to life a 60,000 year long story of [the Aboriginal people to] existence," Rogers said.
"What Soma Lumia is bringing to the work is we are essentially designed and producing all the immersive projections as part of the work."
There will be four projectors projecting on to material dancers can perform behind and in front of to create a dynamic work while depictions are also projected on the material.
"For me, my art is about trying to show a spark of something that's beyond all of the day-to-day and elevate who we are as sentient beings into something quite spiritual," Rogers said.
Rogers has also recently worked with Australian band Midnight Oil, and will be working with Encore Theatre for their production of Chicago in March.
"It was exciting and pretty scary at the same time, because you don't normally get that opportunity. I haven't done that sort of level of work for a band like Midnight Oil," he said.
The Soma Lumia team are busy in 2022, with one of the main projects a work at Launceston's Franklin House.
"It's blooming into something amazing and I'm just a pig in mud right now," Rogers said
https://www.examiner.com.au/story/7573692/career-in-arts-recorded-with-new-video-opportunities/
Launceston artist Darryl Rogers shares incredible achievements in industry, and what's next
A Launceston artist's already illustrious career has continued to take strides towards bigger and better things as 2022 gets underway.
Darryl Rogers started his art career at college and went into theatre, becoming an art director and set designer. Over 30 years, he learnt from some of the best in the industry.
"That sort of catapulted me into designing tourism attractions across Australia. There was major initiatives around that time that were spending a lot of money trying to get people to go into the outback," he said.
"We were using lots of technology. We were innovative by telling stories in quite dynamic ways using multiple screens, multiple projectors, using holograms, all sorts of things."
In the midst of all the work, Rogers realised his passion for being a filmmaker while he was creating television for SBS and ABC.
"Movie making was always sort of central to what I was interested in ... I was really keen and developing a real interest in telling stories through videos," he said.
"Now I make video art. My interest is trying to make video look like paintings. I try to use video in a way that's expressive."
So how did Rogers come to bring his talent to Tasmania? Well, the artist decided he wanted to revisit his roots as an artist and found himself thinking the island would be the place to do it.
After going back to university and completing several degrees, Rogers decided to commit to what he calls his art practice of video work.
The decision has led to the artist creating some incredible works for places like the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and working with some very talented artists.
"As part of my practice, I've actually formed a relationship with a couple of other guys ... and we created a group called Soma Lumia - a tech art collective," Rogers said.
The team has worked with Mona Foma over the past three years to create works such as a VR experience of the Tarkine rainforest, a video art laser experience at the Penny Royal, and a responsive work where the participant could dance in real time with others located in different areas.
"[For Mona Foma 2022] we were asked to collaborate with pakana kanaplila, Tasdance, and others to bring to life a 60,000 year long story of [the Aboriginal people to] existence," Rogers said.
"What Soma Lumia is bringing to the work is we are essentially designed and producing all the immersive projections as part of the work."
There will be four projectors projecting on to material dancers can perform behind and in front of to create a dynamic work while depictions are also projected on the material.
"For me, my art is about trying to show a spark of something that's beyond all of the day-to-day and elevate who we are as sentient beings into something quite spiritual," Rogers said.
Rogers has also recently worked with Australian band Midnight Oil, and will be working with Encore Theatre for their production of Chicago in March.
"It was exciting and pretty scary at the same time, because you don't normally get that opportunity. I haven't done that sort of level of work for a band like Midnight Oil," he said.
The Soma Lumia team are busy in 2022, with one of the main projects a work at Launceston's Franklin House.
"It's blooming into something amazing and I'm just a pig in mud right now," Rogers said
https://www.examiner.com.au/story/7573692/career-in-arts-recorded-with-new-video-opportunities/
VISUAL ART: Dave Gough and Darryl Rogers with their new work Taymi Ningina
which will be displayed as part of QVMAG's relaunch of the Royal Park site. Picture: Paul Scambler
which will be displayed as part of QVMAG's relaunch of the Royal Park site. Picture: Paul Scambler
{...} The new display features 19 new acquisitions and nine new commissioned works from Australian artists.
Taymi Ningina by Vicki West, Dave Gough and Darryl Rogers is one of the new Indigenous additions which highlights the art gallery, formerly a tea tree forest, presence on Indigenous land in a visually striking multimedia format.
"It is a powerful work and its great to have a work like this at the entrance of the [QVMAG], it's a major step forwards and this whole exhibition is a major step forwards in my eyes," Gough said.
"It's about reclaiming something that is sovereign on this land," Rogers said.
Taymi Ningina by Vicki West, Dave Gough and Darryl Rogers is one of the new Indigenous additions which highlights the art gallery, formerly a tea tree forest, presence on Indigenous land in a visually striking multimedia format.
"It is a powerful work and its great to have a work like this at the entrance of the [QVMAG], it's a major step forwards and this whole exhibition is a major step forwards in my eyes," Gough said.
"It's about reclaiming something that is sovereign on this land," Rogers said.
taymi ningina / Never Ceded
My favourite artwork on display brings the overbearing portrait and namesake of the regional art museum into sharp relief. The commission by trawlwoolway artists Vicki West and Dave mangenner Gough with Daryl Rogers, taymi ningina never ceded (2021), is an impressive fourteen-channel video installation across the entrance stairwells of the Royal Park galleries. The artists portray fibrework moving back and forth between generations, across the many screens mounted on the deep ochre coloured gallery walls. The work taymi ningina never ceded is a work of welcome, of assertion of palawa/pakana sovereignty, and of connection with ancestral generations and future generations. It is a marker of the precolonial history of the gallery site itself: a firestick-farmed landscape of tea-tree forests, where palawa/pakana peoples thrived. In the artists’ statement, “the smoke drifts across the surface of a reproduction of Robert Dowling’s portrait of Queen Victoria, which hung in this stairway for many years”. Literally a remediation of the settler colonial presence, recent as it is, overlaid on First Nations territories and ways of relating, this work, and through it, QVMAG, resists the so-called culture wars of conservatives that seek to entrench race hierarchy and white cultural amnesia across Australia.
Dr Léuli Eshrāghi https://memoreview.net/reviews/paradise-lost-thomas-griffiths-wainewright-at-tmag-and-herself-at-qvmag-by-leuli-eshraghi
Hypnos Cave - Launceston Examiner January 2020
More than 4000 attended The Examiner's festival highlight: the Dark Ride takeover at Penny Royal, called Hypnos Cave. This was an installation in the best Mona Foma tradition: fun, irreverent art that is enjoyable for everybody - not just for people with a fine arts degree - that didn't take itself too seriously.
Everybody we went with had a different interpretation on what the laser show, trippy video projections and techno soundtrack were supposed to "mean", exactly. But no matter what you took out of it, it was a joy.
Like much of Mona Foma's offerings, the Dark Ride - the project of Robin Fox's Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio and Launceston video team Soma Lumia - was cool for two reasons. One, the experience itself, and two, for the fact that it even happened.
Lyndon Riggall Hypnos Cave Review
Based in the re-invented Penny Royal complex, Soma Lumia and Mess’s Hypnos Cave is a boat ride into the bowels of the adventure park, re-imagined for the MONA FOMA crowd through the addition of psychedelic imagery, sound and laser-lighting.
Soma Lumia saw great success with their virtual reality experience, Takayna Anthropocene Blues at MONA FOMA in 2019. Now, they return to the festival again in collaboration with the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) to transform their convict barge crawl beneath Penny Royal into a raving party cruise, drawing upon concepts of Greek mythology and specifically the notion of a ferry to the underworld, passing through the realms of sleep and dreaming. Inside Hypnos Cave, the imagery is preoccupied with notions of life and death, light and darkness, movement and colour. Eyes hover and float and flowers spin… all of it keenly timed to a pulsing, mesmerising soundtrack. In simple terms: it’s a real trip.
Curiously, there remain many shades of what was before, and several of the animatronic citizens of the co-opted Dark Ride have hilariously been re-imagined through hallucinogenic eyes. Colonial soldiers who once enacted the pursuit of Matthew Brady are stripped of their uniforms, and all illusion of historical accuracy is torn off with them. Instead, they become strange droids that seem to move in time with the rhythm of the sound as if exhibiting some perverted kind of dancing. Once-fierce bloodhounds now rock frat-boy shades, and soldier’s rifles fire illuminated shots into the water that cast splashes and arcs of rainbow colouring. The whole thing is deeply, deeply odd, yet it is also surprising, captivating, and a complete re-invention of the ride’s original intent for both an innovative and superior result.
If anything, the greatest weakness of Hypnos Cave is that the ride ends—not with a sublime emergence from dreaming back to waking through a final set of doors to daylight—but with an unceremonious cease of the barge’s movement and a MONA FOMA volunteer darkly informing punters that “this is the end, actually.” Nevertheless, Hypnos Cave delivers what it promises on the tin: a thrilling, hypnotic journey to a place where dreams flow into waking.
My favourite artwork on display brings the overbearing portrait and namesake of the regional art museum into sharp relief. The commission by trawlwoolway artists Vicki West and Dave mangenner Gough with Daryl Rogers, taymi ningina never ceded (2021), is an impressive fourteen-channel video installation across the entrance stairwells of the Royal Park galleries. The artists portray fibrework moving back and forth between generations, across the many screens mounted on the deep ochre coloured gallery walls. The work taymi ningina never ceded is a work of welcome, of assertion of palawa/pakana sovereignty, and of connection with ancestral generations and future generations. It is a marker of the precolonial history of the gallery site itself: a firestick-farmed landscape of tea-tree forests, where palawa/pakana peoples thrived. In the artists’ statement, “the smoke drifts across the surface of a reproduction of Robert Dowling’s portrait of Queen Victoria, which hung in this stairway for many years”. Literally a remediation of the settler colonial presence, recent as it is, overlaid on First Nations territories and ways of relating, this work, and through it, QVMAG, resists the so-called culture wars of conservatives that seek to entrench race hierarchy and white cultural amnesia across Australia.
Dr Léuli Eshrāghi https://memoreview.net/reviews/paradise-lost-thomas-griffiths-wainewright-at-tmag-and-herself-at-qvmag-by-leuli-eshraghi
Hypnos Cave - Launceston Examiner January 2020
More than 4000 attended The Examiner's festival highlight: the Dark Ride takeover at Penny Royal, called Hypnos Cave. This was an installation in the best Mona Foma tradition: fun, irreverent art that is enjoyable for everybody - not just for people with a fine arts degree - that didn't take itself too seriously.
Everybody we went with had a different interpretation on what the laser show, trippy video projections and techno soundtrack were supposed to "mean", exactly. But no matter what you took out of it, it was a joy.
Like much of Mona Foma's offerings, the Dark Ride - the project of Robin Fox's Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio and Launceston video team Soma Lumia - was cool for two reasons. One, the experience itself, and two, for the fact that it even happened.
Lyndon Riggall Hypnos Cave Review
Based in the re-invented Penny Royal complex, Soma Lumia and Mess’s Hypnos Cave is a boat ride into the bowels of the adventure park, re-imagined for the MONA FOMA crowd through the addition of psychedelic imagery, sound and laser-lighting.
Soma Lumia saw great success with their virtual reality experience, Takayna Anthropocene Blues at MONA FOMA in 2019. Now, they return to the festival again in collaboration with the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) to transform their convict barge crawl beneath Penny Royal into a raving party cruise, drawing upon concepts of Greek mythology and specifically the notion of a ferry to the underworld, passing through the realms of sleep and dreaming. Inside Hypnos Cave, the imagery is preoccupied with notions of life and death, light and darkness, movement and colour. Eyes hover and float and flowers spin… all of it keenly timed to a pulsing, mesmerising soundtrack. In simple terms: it’s a real trip.
Curiously, there remain many shades of what was before, and several of the animatronic citizens of the co-opted Dark Ride have hilariously been re-imagined through hallucinogenic eyes. Colonial soldiers who once enacted the pursuit of Matthew Brady are stripped of their uniforms, and all illusion of historical accuracy is torn off with them. Instead, they become strange droids that seem to move in time with the rhythm of the sound as if exhibiting some perverted kind of dancing. Once-fierce bloodhounds now rock frat-boy shades, and soldier’s rifles fire illuminated shots into the water that cast splashes and arcs of rainbow colouring. The whole thing is deeply, deeply odd, yet it is also surprising, captivating, and a complete re-invention of the ride’s original intent for both an innovative and superior result.
If anything, the greatest weakness of Hypnos Cave is that the ride ends—not with a sublime emergence from dreaming back to waking through a final set of doors to daylight—but with an unceremonious cease of the barge’s movement and a MONA FOMA volunteer darkly informing punters that “this is the end, actually.” Nevertheless, Hypnos Cave delivers what it promises on the tin: a thrilling, hypnotic journey to a place where dreams flow into waking.
[........] . It is hard to discern what is the truth and what is fiction when it comes to tales of the Tasmanian tiger.
That mystery is part of the extinct, iconic animal’s allure.
The lights are dimmed, a soundtrack recorded in the Tarkine is playing, and the temperature is set just a few degrees below the rest of the gallery.
It is designed to immerse the patron in the Tasmanian landscape.
In the corner, a light flickers behind a blind-style structure.
If one lingers long enough, they can begin to see Tasmanian wildlife emerging from behind tree trunks within the hut.
The installation is the work of Darryl Rogers, a set designer and museum design consultant, who worked with Ms Eastley on the bringing The Tiger Room together.
The design features holographic-style appearances from quolls, wombats, devils, and of course, a tiger.
“It’s a trick of reflection,” Rogers said of the installation.
Rogers explained that the trickery arose in the 1600s, but found popularity in the 1800s, thanks to one Professor John Pepper, who used it to make science more appealing to the masses.
The technique would go on to be called Pepper’s Ghost, and still makes a name for itself today – long-dead rapper Tupac Shakur was brought back to life at the 2012 Coachella music festival through the reflective trick.
“It looks like a hologram but all it is really is a reflection in plates of glass,” Rogers explained.
The devils footage was filmed at the nearby Devils @ Cradle wildlife sanctuary, and the quoll and wombat at Trowunna wildlife sanctuary.
To recreate the tiger’s predatory prowl, Rogers linked up with a Spanish designer online, they tag-teamed on creating the clip.
Rogers’ idea to show all these animals walking through Tasmanian bushland together – all at varying degrees of extinction or population danger – is to prompt a sense of responsibility in wider society.
“This is all an attempt to make this story a little bit more real,” Rogers said.
“The whole idea is that we take on board what we’ve done; we’ve been irresponsible with our ecosystem.
“There’s an opportunity (now) to take notice, and say, ‘We’ve got to stop’.”
The Tiger Room is part of the Wilderness Gallery at Cradle Mountain Hotel, which was relaunched by Tasmanian Governor Kate Warner on July 3.
FULL STORY (and video)...
www.examiner.com.au/story/4777346/bringing-the-thylacine-back-to-life-photos-video/?cs=5312#slide=2
That mystery is part of the extinct, iconic animal’s allure.
The lights are dimmed, a soundtrack recorded in the Tarkine is playing, and the temperature is set just a few degrees below the rest of the gallery.
It is designed to immerse the patron in the Tasmanian landscape.
In the corner, a light flickers behind a blind-style structure.
If one lingers long enough, they can begin to see Tasmanian wildlife emerging from behind tree trunks within the hut.
The installation is the work of Darryl Rogers, a set designer and museum design consultant, who worked with Ms Eastley on the bringing The Tiger Room together.
The design features holographic-style appearances from quolls, wombats, devils, and of course, a tiger.
“It’s a trick of reflection,” Rogers said of the installation.
Rogers explained that the trickery arose in the 1600s, but found popularity in the 1800s, thanks to one Professor John Pepper, who used it to make science more appealing to the masses.
The technique would go on to be called Pepper’s Ghost, and still makes a name for itself today – long-dead rapper Tupac Shakur was brought back to life at the 2012 Coachella music festival through the reflective trick.
“It looks like a hologram but all it is really is a reflection in plates of glass,” Rogers explained.
The devils footage was filmed at the nearby Devils @ Cradle wildlife sanctuary, and the quoll and wombat at Trowunna wildlife sanctuary.
To recreate the tiger’s predatory prowl, Rogers linked up with a Spanish designer online, they tag-teamed on creating the clip.
Rogers’ idea to show all these animals walking through Tasmanian bushland together – all at varying degrees of extinction or population danger – is to prompt a sense of responsibility in wider society.
“This is all an attempt to make this story a little bit more real,” Rogers said.
“The whole idea is that we take on board what we’ve done; we’ve been irresponsible with our ecosystem.
“There’s an opportunity (now) to take notice, and say, ‘We’ve got to stop’.”
The Tiger Room is part of the Wilderness Gallery at Cradle Mountain Hotel, which was relaunched by Tasmanian Governor Kate Warner on July 3.
FULL STORY (and video)...
www.examiner.com.au/story/4777346/bringing-the-thylacine-back-to-life-photos-video/?cs=5312#slide=2
Takayna Hypostasis opens at Sawtooth
By Sarah Aquilina@sarahaqu (Examiner Launceston)
7 Oct 2016, 5 p.m.
NATURE: Soma Lumia members Joe Robinson and Darryl Rogers stand with half of their video work, Takayna Hypostasis #1.
You hear the sounds of native birds chirping in the trees and leaves crunching under your feet as you walk through a luscious, thick, green forest. Do you stop and enjoy the moment or keep trekking?
An immersive, interactive art experience at Sawtooth Artist Run Initiative invites viewers to consume and connect with a three-dimensional experience of the Tarkine rainforest.
Takayna Hypostasis is a high-tech artwork collaboration by Soma Lumia.
The group consists of artists Darryl Rogers and Troy Merritt, with technology experts Joe Robinson, Brendan Hodkinson, Bruce Andrews, James Riggall and Mike Cruse. Each member plays an integral role in creating, producing, editing, installing and coding the project which requires 800 individual, computer-controlled LED lights behind two semi-translucent screens.
“I wanted to do an artwork that actually brought people into the Tarkine in a real way,” Rogers said. “What I am interested in, I guess, is this idea that there is a deeper reality to things and an interconnectedness,” he said. Takayna Hypostasis registers the movement and stillness of viewers.
As visitors enter the space LED lights react to their stillness, as movement in the room becomes obsolete the dynamic lights brighten and a soundtrack begins to play creating a harmonic replica of the Tarkine. I wanted to do an artwork that actually brought people into the Tarkine in a real way.- Artist Darryl Rogers
“This whole work is simply about the stiller you stand the more alive that environment becomes,” Rogers said.
“It also has connections to the way we affect the environment.” Rogers hoped the work would use a new experience to create a powerful sense of environment. “When you stop and observe something deeper happens in terms of how you connect with that world around you,” he said.
Rogers drew inspiration from the Tarkine in Motion group. “I’ve been following them for some time and thought, ‘I’d like to do a work that somehow has connections to that part of Tasmania’,” he said.
Discussions about the concept of Takayna Hypostasis began about 12-months ago. “I am always playing around with this idea of what’s real and what’s not real,” Rogers said.
The video artwork will be displayed at Sawtooth ARI until October 29. http://www.examiner.com.au/story/4214066/immersive-video-work/?cs=94
By Sarah Aquilina@sarahaqu (Examiner Launceston)
7 Oct 2016, 5 p.m.
NATURE: Soma Lumia members Joe Robinson and Darryl Rogers stand with half of their video work, Takayna Hypostasis #1.
You hear the sounds of native birds chirping in the trees and leaves crunching under your feet as you walk through a luscious, thick, green forest. Do you stop and enjoy the moment or keep trekking?
An immersive, interactive art experience at Sawtooth Artist Run Initiative invites viewers to consume and connect with a three-dimensional experience of the Tarkine rainforest.
Takayna Hypostasis is a high-tech artwork collaboration by Soma Lumia.
The group consists of artists Darryl Rogers and Troy Merritt, with technology experts Joe Robinson, Brendan Hodkinson, Bruce Andrews, James Riggall and Mike Cruse. Each member plays an integral role in creating, producing, editing, installing and coding the project which requires 800 individual, computer-controlled LED lights behind two semi-translucent screens.
“I wanted to do an artwork that actually brought people into the Tarkine in a real way,” Rogers said. “What I am interested in, I guess, is this idea that there is a deeper reality to things and an interconnectedness,” he said. Takayna Hypostasis registers the movement and stillness of viewers.
As visitors enter the space LED lights react to their stillness, as movement in the room becomes obsolete the dynamic lights brighten and a soundtrack begins to play creating a harmonic replica of the Tarkine. I wanted to do an artwork that actually brought people into the Tarkine in a real way.- Artist Darryl Rogers
“This whole work is simply about the stiller you stand the more alive that environment becomes,” Rogers said.
“It also has connections to the way we affect the environment.” Rogers hoped the work would use a new experience to create a powerful sense of environment. “When you stop and observe something deeper happens in terms of how you connect with that world around you,” he said.
Rogers drew inspiration from the Tarkine in Motion group. “I’ve been following them for some time and thought, ‘I’d like to do a work that somehow has connections to that part of Tasmania’,” he said.
Discussions about the concept of Takayna Hypostasis began about 12-months ago. “I am always playing around with this idea of what’s real and what’s not real,” Rogers said.
The video artwork will be displayed at Sawtooth ARI until October 29. http://www.examiner.com.au/story/4214066/immersive-video-work/?cs=94
Numinous i
Darryl Rogers and David Howard
Jugglers Art Space Brisbane
Concrete Playground Review July 2015
by Talina McKenzie
This exhibition doesn't just have a spiritual quality to it — it's divine.
The term ‘numinous’ is used to describe something that has a spiritual or religious quality, reflecting the presence of divinity. In Numinous-i, artists David Howard and Darryl Rogers explore spirituality in its duality with the material, with an approach that sees divinity in quantum theory as much as religion.
Darryl Rogers evokes mystery and the universal longing for an alternate reality in his work Sehnsucht, a four-channel video installation that acts as a grounding centerpiece to the exhibition space. Rogers’ holograms and projections are like ghosts of other possibilities — a haunting reminder of the impermanence of our existence. David Howard’s painting series Apostasy encircles Rogers’ work in a temple-like formation, questioning how today’s world of digital connectivity results in a disconnection of the spirit, body and mind.
Darryl Rogers and David Howard
Jugglers Art Space Brisbane
Concrete Playground Review July 2015
by Talina McKenzie
This exhibition doesn't just have a spiritual quality to it — it's divine.
The term ‘numinous’ is used to describe something that has a spiritual or religious quality, reflecting the presence of divinity. In Numinous-i, artists David Howard and Darryl Rogers explore spirituality in its duality with the material, with an approach that sees divinity in quantum theory as much as religion.
Darryl Rogers evokes mystery and the universal longing for an alternate reality in his work Sehnsucht, a four-channel video installation that acts as a grounding centerpiece to the exhibition space. Rogers’ holograms and projections are like ghosts of other possibilities — a haunting reminder of the impermanence of our existence. David Howard’s painting series Apostasy encircles Rogers’ work in a temple-like formation, questioning how today’s world of digital connectivity results in a disconnection of the spirit, body and mind.
Numinous i Jugglers Art Space Review
Article written by Sophie Rose
On entering numinous- i, one is invited into a space of sanctified quietness. A series of large, busy, Primitive-esque paintings by David Howard encircle a suspended black box, containing Darryl Roger’s hologram piece, Sehnsucht; and so, pagan visions surround the tabernacle. A sense of ritual undoubtedly informs both sets of work, yet is manifested quite differently in each. Howard gives a wild, uncontained spilling-forward of figures: as if spirits have seeped from the canvas into the gallery space. The shapes seem to balloon before one’s eyes: the image is full of gaseous intensity. Rogers provides a far more internal experience. One must enter his space; the art becomes a kind of confession-box and, as such, the surrounding area of the gallery begins to concave in on the box. The coupling of these two artists is something like the coming together of the voodoo and the sacramental, to create a meta-spiritualism.
It is from this that we can consider both artists in a dialogue with Magritte’ian surrealism. In both works, one figure slowly morphs into another. In Howard’s paintings this transition is spatial. Thick coils join one shape to the next, springs jump out from the background and various substitutions – a saucer for eyes, a river for a tongue and the face divided like tectonic plates- form conceptual links between shapes. What Howard makes apparent is that the mind does work to see saucers in eyes and connective “coils”, that is associations, between the objects in our world.
Rogers achieves much the same effect in the temporal. His hologram is projected onto a model stage, allowing a pantomime of associations to unfold. Against a backdrop of ocean, a moon superimposed by a sheet of clouds sits. On looking at this collage one cannot help but separate the elements: a moon sits above the sea; a moon lies in the sky with clouds. Each still forms a condensation of associative imagery: a reduction of common memory into a code. And yet nothing stays still. The moon fades into brick, the brick into wild dog. If in automatic drawing the hand is allowed to move freely over the page, then here we have something like automatic theatre: the show moves freely from one concept to another, following the thread of a playful mind.
Through its bold and heavy forms, Howard’s series brings Surrealism back to its Cubist and Primitive roots. The shapes in the work push out from the canvas, tense behind the picture plane, bouncing off its surface. The small sections of titanium white leap out at the viewer, above the collection of deep greens, yellows and red. The images appear to bubble to the surface, pushing against the picture plane. Like water boiling beneath the lid of a saucepan, the tightness of Howard’s painted forms creates a repulsive force against the eye. The paintings provides a retrospective insight into this repulsive nature of surrealism and the surreal nature of the repulsive: often we say of something strange, a dream perhaps, that it cannot be grasped and that it seems to work against one’s memory.
On the other hand, Rogers brings Surrealism forward to what may be considered its natural conclusion: the virtual realm. In digital art, images can be collected, stored and rearranged with great ease; pictures of different times and places can be brought into the same space with the click of a button. As Rogers explains, many different images stream into his process: My digital art is approached like a collage. I collect images, video, 3D meshes and other art works that interest me, over a very long period of time. The video imagery in Sehnsucht was collected from disparate times, a holiday in the Whitsundays, a walk on a beach in Tasmania, a chance connection with a 3D modeler in Madrid. (Darryl Rogers, 17 October 2015)
If we consider the various images one sees on a computer screen, associations between them are not necessarily pre-ordained but generated by their collection in the one space. In other words, Rogers’ images are not products of a singular theme but hold a potential to create a number of different ideas, depending on their arrangement. In this way, a “memory” between objects is creative: one does immediately know the connection between the sea and a brick wall but is forced to create one; both can shield objects from view, perhaps. However, the spiritual is not merely the surreal but also the ritualistic. Here it is worth considering the use of repetition in both artists’ work. In Howard’s paintings, rhythm bounces form one canvas to the next. As a series, one might be tempted to think that Howard’s work is monotonous: that each canvas is very similar to the next. However, what may appear at first to be repetition is, more precisely, insistence. In Gertrude Stein’s famous line “a rose is a rose is a rose”, one does not hear “rose” in monotone but with a varying stress on each repetition. Similarly, each canvas by Howard embodies a different character; has a different stress to it, one could say. Motifs are carried throughout the series, in particular, wires and coils. Yet from painting to painting we see wires thicken, coils accumulate and spirals tighten.
The repetition in Rogers’ work is more dreamlike, as if following a steady mantra. The transitions from one frame to the next are regular and slow. Sehnsucht is a German word that means to long for a home never able to be obtained. It is to feel a kind of dislocated nostalgia: to miss something without knowing precisely what that object of desire is. Watching Rogers’ work for a few minutes entails seeing repetitions of the video. After a while, one cannot remember whether the memory of an image in the hologram originates in real life or from a prior cycle of the tape. The work is not only about a dissociative memory but in fact induces the very feeling of sehnsucht in its rhythm.
The exhibition lives up to the expectation set in its title. Both artists achieve that specific combination of dream and ritual embodied in religious sensation. This is a show that matches its theory with competence and beauty.
— Jugglers 19/10/15 . http://www.jugglers.org.au/two-pages/2015/10/19/numinous-i-at-jugglers-art-space-oct-9th-to-21st-http://writeresponse.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/darryl-rogers-reviewed-in-brisbane-show.html
Article written by Sophie Rose
On entering numinous- i, one is invited into a space of sanctified quietness. A series of large, busy, Primitive-esque paintings by David Howard encircle a suspended black box, containing Darryl Roger’s hologram piece, Sehnsucht; and so, pagan visions surround the tabernacle. A sense of ritual undoubtedly informs both sets of work, yet is manifested quite differently in each. Howard gives a wild, uncontained spilling-forward of figures: as if spirits have seeped from the canvas into the gallery space. The shapes seem to balloon before one’s eyes: the image is full of gaseous intensity. Rogers provides a far more internal experience. One must enter his space; the art becomes a kind of confession-box and, as such, the surrounding area of the gallery begins to concave in on the box. The coupling of these two artists is something like the coming together of the voodoo and the sacramental, to create a meta-spiritualism.
It is from this that we can consider both artists in a dialogue with Magritte’ian surrealism. In both works, one figure slowly morphs into another. In Howard’s paintings this transition is spatial. Thick coils join one shape to the next, springs jump out from the background and various substitutions – a saucer for eyes, a river for a tongue and the face divided like tectonic plates- form conceptual links between shapes. What Howard makes apparent is that the mind does work to see saucers in eyes and connective “coils”, that is associations, between the objects in our world.
Rogers achieves much the same effect in the temporal. His hologram is projected onto a model stage, allowing a pantomime of associations to unfold. Against a backdrop of ocean, a moon superimposed by a sheet of clouds sits. On looking at this collage one cannot help but separate the elements: a moon sits above the sea; a moon lies in the sky with clouds. Each still forms a condensation of associative imagery: a reduction of common memory into a code. And yet nothing stays still. The moon fades into brick, the brick into wild dog. If in automatic drawing the hand is allowed to move freely over the page, then here we have something like automatic theatre: the show moves freely from one concept to another, following the thread of a playful mind.
Through its bold and heavy forms, Howard’s series brings Surrealism back to its Cubist and Primitive roots. The shapes in the work push out from the canvas, tense behind the picture plane, bouncing off its surface. The small sections of titanium white leap out at the viewer, above the collection of deep greens, yellows and red. The images appear to bubble to the surface, pushing against the picture plane. Like water boiling beneath the lid of a saucepan, the tightness of Howard’s painted forms creates a repulsive force against the eye. The paintings provides a retrospective insight into this repulsive nature of surrealism and the surreal nature of the repulsive: often we say of something strange, a dream perhaps, that it cannot be grasped and that it seems to work against one’s memory.
On the other hand, Rogers brings Surrealism forward to what may be considered its natural conclusion: the virtual realm. In digital art, images can be collected, stored and rearranged with great ease; pictures of different times and places can be brought into the same space with the click of a button. As Rogers explains, many different images stream into his process: My digital art is approached like a collage. I collect images, video, 3D meshes and other art works that interest me, over a very long period of time. The video imagery in Sehnsucht was collected from disparate times, a holiday in the Whitsundays, a walk on a beach in Tasmania, a chance connection with a 3D modeler in Madrid. (Darryl Rogers, 17 October 2015)
If we consider the various images one sees on a computer screen, associations between them are not necessarily pre-ordained but generated by their collection in the one space. In other words, Rogers’ images are not products of a singular theme but hold a potential to create a number of different ideas, depending on their arrangement. In this way, a “memory” between objects is creative: one does immediately know the connection between the sea and a brick wall but is forced to create one; both can shield objects from view, perhaps. However, the spiritual is not merely the surreal but also the ritualistic. Here it is worth considering the use of repetition in both artists’ work. In Howard’s paintings, rhythm bounces form one canvas to the next. As a series, one might be tempted to think that Howard’s work is monotonous: that each canvas is very similar to the next. However, what may appear at first to be repetition is, more precisely, insistence. In Gertrude Stein’s famous line “a rose is a rose is a rose”, one does not hear “rose” in monotone but with a varying stress on each repetition. Similarly, each canvas by Howard embodies a different character; has a different stress to it, one could say. Motifs are carried throughout the series, in particular, wires and coils. Yet from painting to painting we see wires thicken, coils accumulate and spirals tighten.
The repetition in Rogers’ work is more dreamlike, as if following a steady mantra. The transitions from one frame to the next are regular and slow. Sehnsucht is a German word that means to long for a home never able to be obtained. It is to feel a kind of dislocated nostalgia: to miss something without knowing precisely what that object of desire is. Watching Rogers’ work for a few minutes entails seeing repetitions of the video. After a while, one cannot remember whether the memory of an image in the hologram originates in real life or from a prior cycle of the tape. The work is not only about a dissociative memory but in fact induces the very feeling of sehnsucht in its rhythm.
The exhibition lives up to the expectation set in its title. Both artists achieve that specific combination of dream and ritual embodied in religious sensation. This is a show that matches its theory with competence and beauty.
— Jugglers 19/10/15 . http://www.jugglers.org.au/two-pages/2015/10/19/numinous-i-at-jugglers-art-space-oct-9th-to-21st-http://writeresponse.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/darryl-rogers-reviewed-in-brisbane-show.html
Artist Darryl Rogers with his holographic installation Sehnsucht
Modern take on old technique
6 Jul 2014, midnight
AN EXPERIMENT in the displacement of reality projects on glass at Launceston's Sawtooth Ari Gallery.
Lake Leake artist Darryl Rogers's Sehnsucht display is a video holographic installation based on a technique that harks back to 16th-century Neapolitan scientist Giambattista della Porta.
The display includes two television displays, a projector and a triple- layered audio track, designed to make its viewers question the nature of perception.
Rogers said his installation, while taking about three months to construct, was the result of about two decades of research into the technique - commonly known as Pepper's Ghost.
The display works by projecting an image onto an angled piece of clear glass and has been used to bring illusions of Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur back to live audiences.
Rogers said the intriguing spectacle was the first step in what he hopes can be developed into a more expansive future exhibition.
He said sehnsucht was a German word and loosely translated to English as "a sense of longing for something beyond the reality of this world".
The exhibition will be on display until the end of this month.
- JAMES BRADY . http://www.examiner.com.au/story/2398148/modern-take-on-old-technique/
6 Jul 2014, midnight
AN EXPERIMENT in the displacement of reality projects on glass at Launceston's Sawtooth Ari Gallery.
Lake Leake artist Darryl Rogers's Sehnsucht display is a video holographic installation based on a technique that harks back to 16th-century Neapolitan scientist Giambattista della Porta.
The display includes two television displays, a projector and a triple- layered audio track, designed to make its viewers question the nature of perception.
Rogers said his installation, while taking about three months to construct, was the result of about two decades of research into the technique - commonly known as Pepper's Ghost.
The display works by projecting an image onto an angled piece of clear glass and has been used to bring illusions of Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur back to live audiences.
Rogers said the intriguing spectacle was the first step in what he hopes can be developed into a more expansive future exhibition.
He said sehnsucht was a German word and loosely translated to English as "a sense of longing for something beyond the reality of this world".
The exhibition will be on display until the end of this month.
- JAMES BRADY . http://www.examiner.com.au/story/2398148/modern-take-on-old-technique/
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Waterwalkers
by Patrick Sutczak
At the still point of the turning world, Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor toward; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement, And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point
There would be dance, and there is no dance.
T.S. Eliot, BN II: 16-21
It is important to read that beautiful piece from T.S. Eliot’s epic Four Quartets in order to appreciate the deeper emotional and ontological associations with Darryl Rogers' Waterwalkers currently exhibiting at Sawtooth ARI in Launceston.
A brief but carefully worded blurb attached to the corridor on the way into the exhibition gives us a clue that Roger’s work is rich with complex ideas featuring time, no-time, quantum theory and matter fused with Eliot’s exquisite poetry.
I enter the familiar darkness of Sawtooth’s New Media Space and am confronted firstly with a dual landscape projection piece almost intersecting in the corner of the room. Familiar, but not, what appears to be a landscape complete with a horizon line shimmers and shifts reminiscent of the view from a train window, yet not as simple to process. Because what I am seeing isn’t going one-way. I will refer to it as a landscape (though I could be wrong). No matter, for it isn’t behaving like one. Forwards and backwards at once, the dual projections offer a mesmerising show without becoming disorientating. Nor is it frustrating because there is a sense of the familiar and of passage, yet the inability to let my eyes settle on what I think is there, makes me aware that Rogers' work is trying to prompt me to experience the concept of time in an uncanny way. So it becomes interesting rather than unsettling.
While the projections hold my attention, there is an elephant in the room. Cleverly shaded to blend into the darkness, Waterwalkers achieves its namesake through a rather large installation component. The fact that the room is roped off with a discrete partition suggests that I am being directed toward the front of Rogers' construction which is essentially a tall black box with a long platform stretching from the back of it. While I know it is there, I soon forget and forgive once I walk to the front of it. The mechanics of the exhibition disappear and I understand that this is what the artist wants me to see. And it is quite a show.
A very vivid, almost holographic, figure floats in front of me. It is dressed in white and walking on water (though like Rogers' projections, not as I know it). There is a collection of tuned elements at play - the water is real, the figure is not. The figure isn’t just one either, it becomes many. Male, female, youthful, aging, tall, short, walking forwards, or backwards, or both. All intermingle and challenge my linear brain.
In conjunction with that, the dual projections now dovetail with the walking figure(s). Everything is happening at once. Literally.
Rogers tells us in his statement that he has employed the technique of a Peppers Ghost to achieve his fascinating effect, which in some ways isn’t necessary as Waterwalkers is more than process, and the trickery need not be revealed. One only needs to read the excerpt from Four Quartets to understand that this is poetic embodiment. Waterwalkers embraces theatrical design for sure, and after a while the complexity of the piece creeps into mind, but that should be ignored because this isn’t a case of how.
Waterwalkers, for me, is about standing in the sweet spot in darkness and attempting to isolate the narrative – the singular layer. But I can’t. And that I believe is the point. Waterwalkers isn’t so much tapping into the metaphysical, the ontological, and the material – it is taking all these theories out to dinner and forcing them to get to know each other before going separate ways.
It is clear to me that Waterwalkers carries some weight, and that weight is composed of intelligent thought, complex theory, practical skills and Rogers' sensitive disposition to composition and the evocative power of Eliot’s words.
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point
There would be dance, and there is no dance.
Thought-provoking and fascinating, Waterwalkers is exhibiting at Sawtooth ARI until the end of June, though I do hope it travels. http://vimeo.com/53998257
http://writeresponse.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/waterwalkers_15.html
Waterwalkers
by Patrick Sutczak
At the still point of the turning world, Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor toward; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement, And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point
There would be dance, and there is no dance.
T.S. Eliot, BN II: 16-21
It is important to read that beautiful piece from T.S. Eliot’s epic Four Quartets in order to appreciate the deeper emotional and ontological associations with Darryl Rogers' Waterwalkers currently exhibiting at Sawtooth ARI in Launceston.
A brief but carefully worded blurb attached to the corridor on the way into the exhibition gives us a clue that Roger’s work is rich with complex ideas featuring time, no-time, quantum theory and matter fused with Eliot’s exquisite poetry.
I enter the familiar darkness of Sawtooth’s New Media Space and am confronted firstly with a dual landscape projection piece almost intersecting in the corner of the room. Familiar, but not, what appears to be a landscape complete with a horizon line shimmers and shifts reminiscent of the view from a train window, yet not as simple to process. Because what I am seeing isn’t going one-way. I will refer to it as a landscape (though I could be wrong). No matter, for it isn’t behaving like one. Forwards and backwards at once, the dual projections offer a mesmerising show without becoming disorientating. Nor is it frustrating because there is a sense of the familiar and of passage, yet the inability to let my eyes settle on what I think is there, makes me aware that Rogers' work is trying to prompt me to experience the concept of time in an uncanny way. So it becomes interesting rather than unsettling.
While the projections hold my attention, there is an elephant in the room. Cleverly shaded to blend into the darkness, Waterwalkers achieves its namesake through a rather large installation component. The fact that the room is roped off with a discrete partition suggests that I am being directed toward the front of Rogers' construction which is essentially a tall black box with a long platform stretching from the back of it. While I know it is there, I soon forget and forgive once I walk to the front of it. The mechanics of the exhibition disappear and I understand that this is what the artist wants me to see. And it is quite a show.
A very vivid, almost holographic, figure floats in front of me. It is dressed in white and walking on water (though like Rogers' projections, not as I know it). There is a collection of tuned elements at play - the water is real, the figure is not. The figure isn’t just one either, it becomes many. Male, female, youthful, aging, tall, short, walking forwards, or backwards, or both. All intermingle and challenge my linear brain.
In conjunction with that, the dual projections now dovetail with the walking figure(s). Everything is happening at once. Literally.
Rogers tells us in his statement that he has employed the technique of a Peppers Ghost to achieve his fascinating effect, which in some ways isn’t necessary as Waterwalkers is more than process, and the trickery need not be revealed. One only needs to read the excerpt from Four Quartets to understand that this is poetic embodiment. Waterwalkers embraces theatrical design for sure, and after a while the complexity of the piece creeps into mind, but that should be ignored because this isn’t a case of how.
Waterwalkers, for me, is about standing in the sweet spot in darkness and attempting to isolate the narrative – the singular layer. But I can’t. And that I believe is the point. Waterwalkers isn’t so much tapping into the metaphysical, the ontological, and the material – it is taking all these theories out to dinner and forcing them to get to know each other before going separate ways.
It is clear to me that Waterwalkers carries some weight, and that weight is composed of intelligent thought, complex theory, practical skills and Rogers' sensitive disposition to composition and the evocative power of Eliot’s words.
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point
There would be dance, and there is no dance.
Thought-provoking and fascinating, Waterwalkers is exhibiting at Sawtooth ARI until the end of June, though I do hope it travels. http://vimeo.com/53998257
http://writeresponse.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/waterwalkers_15.html
Copyright Darryl Rogers 2021