FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

{CTS} creative thriftshop in conjunction with Dam Stuhltrager Gallery is proud to present Ron Rocco’s solo exhibition Shake Up! curated by Lynn del Sol as the fourth exhibition in it’s series of the gallery’s sponsorship program East/West Project (Opens Feb. 19th 6-10pm). Former expat Ron Rocco, a multi media artist that is well known for installations that border on the margins of disaster and conflict, presents a single installation that reflects the dissolving sense of social order on a global scale.

Working from Berlin and New York, artist Ron Rocco sculpts material assemblages and deeply referential interventions of signs and space. Tracing back to the scrap metal yards that colored the landscape of his Texas youth, Rocco's practice reveals a clear fascination with material structures and their mutable functions. Occupying a place between sculpture, installation, painting and performance, Rocco's raw aesthetic exposes a potential within inert materials. His objects and assemblages relate nostalgic associations and critically examine signs in and out of context. His sculptures exist as symbols, with layered references to a conflicted identity, personal pathos and a sharp political consciousness.

Shake Up! Is the moment of Shock. The rude awakening after a Turning Point. The moment when the earth moves, and we find ourselves in a hostile new environment. It is also the hope for a ‘wake up call’ to humanity to get with the program of saving our world.

At the center of the gallery sits a 400 pound house composed entirely of enshrined waste materials. The waste material was collected from the streets of Brooklyn and is a material often found in bundled form awaiting recycling. The sheer mass of the object is an attempt to bring to mind the massive mountains of refuse we generate daily. Here it has been compressed and encased in a cast wax form resembling a house. As the artist has done in other artworks such as The Horizon is Nothing (1990) and More than the Limit of Our Sight (1997), the house represents the aggregate of concepts we each possess germane to home, community, and civilization.

This sentiment is intensified for the viewer with the projection and sound-scape of an impending violent storm the artist recorded in Owego, New York on the banks of the Susquehanna River, where he was a resident artist for the Experimental TV Center. The image was processed with the use of a waveform which cycles through the image creating a juxtaposition of positive and negative effects in the image. One might say that this shifting between positive and negative reflects the Tipping Point at which, what under normal circumstances may be seen as a normal storm, shifts into an ecological disaster.

Encircling the entire installation is a 30 yard river of ink covered latex-like fabric which falls from a 7 foot long photo etched aluminum panel in which ghost images of a caribou herd are seen stampeding towards the viewer. The fabric is printed in a wood block style that has been stained with the tire tracks of a fleet of vehicles. The fabric is meant to give the illusion of an animal hide and the tracks speaks to how ecosystems have been bisected by the construction of roadways in the more “wild” areas of our lands.

As a whole, Rocco's highly charged works hint at the collapse of form and function amidst a dissolving sense of social order. His raw and refined aesthetic, expose a highly acute and critical interaction, with intersecting ideologies and histories. He is able to create a space where time is both paused and running short.     
  
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artist interview
Ron Rocco Shake Up! 2010
video courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.