Today Is A Good Day to Die is the title of the book that sits in the center of Kent Rogowski’s life size photograph of a series of self-help books photographed on the half title page. Everything is black font on white paper, simple, understated elegance that allows the essence of the book titles to sweep us away into a narrative, a story about life that travels through time, using words to mark our journey as we consider what has happened and how to negotiate it. Titles like Dancing With Yesterday’s Shadows, No End to Yesterday, Tomorrow is Today, The Myth of Tomorrow, a narrative that flows depending which way you read it, a series of mantras that appeals to the need for a frame by which to view our lives. Here we see in just a few words all the possible outcomes of this moment in time. Titled, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” the print towers at 65 x 55 inches in size, framed alongside a selection of other prints from this series in an exhibition titled “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” at Jen Bekman, New York, from October 20 through November 25.
Rogowski builds his grids of books in three dimensions so that they must line up in a way they never could were he not constructing the photograph. Everything appears flat. It is not. There are inches, sometimes feet, separating the heights and depths of the books so that the depth of field completely disappears in each photograph. For the large scale photographs, he climbs a ladder and shoots seventeen feet above the ground in order to maintain the integrity of the life-size image. And that’s the trick—the fact that these books lie within our grasp, presented as artworks unto themselves, as items that can become just their titles, the perfect soundbyte that speaks in clipped tones with neighboring titles, cleverly positioned by Rogowski for maximum effect.
Rogowski chose self help and motivational books because they address our concerns about the changes of life, the way in which things to happen to us as well as the way we can shape the our fates by becoming captains of destiny. These titles remind us that we all walk a path, one that moves through time and space, and in the case of “There Is a Rainbow” through magical thinking that defies rational thought. Rogowski deftly links the covers together and the result is a freeform heart that flows round and round again, reminding us of bowties and knots and things that connect us to energies unleashed by aesthetically pleasing imagery. “There Is a Rainbow” seduces with its sleek innocence and it is not entirely unsurprising that many of these titles are published in the Christian inspiration section: Sunshine, Rainbows, and Clouds of Whipped Cream, Yes I Am Happy Now, Over the Rainbow Bridge. The flow of these energies is reinforced by the words, that repeat themselves when your eye returns.
Much like the title of the show, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”, Rogowski takes hold and never lets go. The words circle and cycle around the frame until the cumulative effect is a kind of contained chaotic bliss, like covers torn off books, dramatic but not immediately noticeable until little things start to be noticed. Jackets removed from books, flashes of color powerfully placed, line and form and all right angles everywhere, a playground of rectangles that careen and carouse with ideas, at times inspiring, at others, insipid. The trick isn’t in which is correct but in which speaks to you at that moment. The sense of the ephemeral present is contained in these tomes, so swollen with words they burst like candy on the page. Rogowski is on to something brilliant, much like the beloved Bears. His taste for recycling the emotional detritus of life is at once sweet, sad, and silly all the same.
Miss Rosen
I Can’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
From October 20th through November 25th 2012
Jen Bekman
6 Spring Street
New York, NY 10012, USA
(212) 219-0166
