Fiction/Fiction, 2008

Politics/Formalism, 2008 in foreground & Untitled (TV negation #4 & #5), 2008 in background

Politics/Formalism, 2008 in foreground and Argument Against Argument (temporary title), 2008 in background

Can an image not render a command?

Can an artwork disclose the hazard of its desirability?

In his first exhibition at Sea and Space, artist and curator Roger Dickes will be showing three drawings and two sculptures.  

Dickes uses drawing as an actionist gesture and to generate a phenomenological effect.  

Two of the drawings he will be showing are "TVs" and are ceremonial erasures and rejections of a television he once owned, loved and hated. The TVs, made with very light colored pencil on white barrier paper, negate the writing of words and at the same time render white noise. Appearing blank at first, they slowly create a screen-like luminance.

A third drawing laboriously reproduces a color-halftone picture of the left ear of Dickes' friend using pigment marker on white barrier paper. A different screen-like effect, more along the lines of electronic display, is achieved. This drawing is on one level simply a tribute to the memory of Dickes' conversations with his friend, but beyond this argues for circumspection, deference (but not submission), and the notion of a "listening" image.

Dickes calls his two sculptures "parameterizations" and they are intended to diagram the axiomatic limits of practice. One of the sculptures is the size of a cocktail table and suggests relationships between primary and secondary color, elemental 3d geometry, and the most basic concepts of set theory. The second sculpture is a full-scale photo backdrop/stage that laments the seemingly inextricable link between interpretation and hierarchy. These two sculptural works continue an ongoing and open-ended project begun in 1995.

In all cases, Dickes hopes these artworks present critiques of themselves as commodities and impede a process of message making based on use-value.   The title of the show, "Firmament Av." is a prayer, utopian and dispossessed, and also a street that intersects Ventura Boulevard just a few blocks east of the 405 Freeway.

Roger Dickes is director of The Glendale College Art Gallery. He has exhibited his art works in group and solo formats in Los Angeles since 1998.  
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