Altman Siegel is delighted to present Night keeps all your heart, a solo exhibition by Will Rogan. This marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
“This work started after I took a fall off a rooftop I was helping to build. It was the kind of fall that I should have had a more major injury from or could have had. But not even a broken rib. When I hit the ground, I broke a 2 x 4” piece of wood with my head. The outcome of the head injury was to become incredibly sensitive to the death end of the life cycle.
It was the peak part of the season here in Vermont. The leaves had become as red as they would and were starting to become compost. So, some of this work will be about falling, both literal falling and figurative falling, about the feeling of falling. We are all falling, all approaching that thing that will eventually take our lives. We are all eventual compost. There is a beauty to this, this falling that we are all doing. Gravity is the great leveler, pulling us all toward this body we collectively occupy and toward our eventual duty to it, to return our bodies to it.
The work is made from wood my father collected during his years as a woodworker, along with wood my good friend Jim's father collected during his time as a woodworker. I am interested in the bits they left behind, these scraps that were too special to discard. Some of the wood is nostalgic, like wood from a tree cut down in my dad’s yard from his childhood home. Some are exotic, like bloodwood, which my dad must have purchased for some special cabinet job; others are specific like the piece of American chestnut wood from an extinct tree passed on to me by Jim via his father.
Lately, I have been spending most of my days working with wood. The house I am building is 95% woodwork. I heat it with wood, some of which I harvest and split. I have been making syrup from the trees around. Wood is everywhere, and my general surroundings are usually where the work starts. My work is pretty intuitive and intentionally not refined. I am not attempting to achieve some high craftsmanship. It was pointed out to me that I paint on some very rare and fancy woods in some of my sculptures. As an artist, I sometimes offend master woodworkers with my treatment of the material.
The general structure of most of the sculptures is this 45-degree triangle shape that hangs on the wall. It is a two-faced shape that allows for two connected facets. I think of them in several different ways. With two faces, you can talk about how one thing can change through time (the left face can represent the past, the right the future), or they can be two figures in relationship to one another. They can be the same figure separated by time or tied together by circumstance. Sometimes, there is only one face…”
- Will Rogan
Will Rogan lives and works in West Brookfield, Vermont. Rogan’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, Japan; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Laurel Gitlen, New York, NY; and Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA. Group exhibitions include Parallax Art Center, Portland, OR; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai, China. Rogan co-founded THE THING Quarterly with artist John Herschend in 2007.
