Bryan’s thesis show opens on Monday, and I wrote a little essay for it (below his show card). Of course, he’s decided to scratch the idea of hanging his recent paintings, so you’ll have to come by to see what he’s done instead. His sneaky switch renders my essay a bit off target, but that’s okay. Actually, it makes we wonder what would happen if more artists were to disregard their press-releases in favor of spontaneous, last-minute, and even wrongheaded gestures at the eleventh-hour…

Rogers’ exhibition title, “Woods Cross Roads,” is the original name of the street where the artist grew up. The street’s name was later changed, and Rogers’ parents have since moved to another part of town.

Still, Rogers maintains a connection to his boyhood home: a farmhouse accompanied by barns and sheds, surrounded by an expanse of horse-grazed acreage. For Rogers, it was a place of work and play, construction and invention. It was a place that, by virtue of its interrelated but discrete spaces, offered him some perspectives on perspective.

On the farm, a head’s tilt was like a turn of phrase. The defunct street name “Woods Cross Roads” could declare the impossibility of ambulating trees, alluding to Tolkien’s plodding Ents or the Weird Sister’s omen of Birnam Wood. It might also poetically describe the material and structure of a stretcher-bar support.

Like with “Woods Cross Roads,” Rogers’ works are oddly declarative and non-specific; they remain frozen in a present-tense while suggesting plurality and the transience of all things and places. Even his titles—S. City on the Slide (2010), Making Cheer (2010), Fixing Old Faithful (2009)—remind us of this zone where things are happening, being made, and breaking down all at once; an ecology and world-view that is dynamic, destructive, and creative in equal measure.

Rogers’ paintings conflate observed, found, and imagined places, people, and things within the strictures of a given field. Despite and through visual incongruities, repeats, glitches, blurs, and stops, Rogers explicitly asserts that these are constructed worlds. Whether from the promiscuous well of a Google image-search, the soaring, panoptic gaze of satellite captures, or the patterns of his own imagination, the worlds rallied into Rogers’ paintings avow the reign, ruin, and reinvention engendered by and through representation.

Rogers will often provide us with little ways to traverse his designs, whether via depictions of steps and ladders or Halley-esque “conduits” burrowing through the picture plane. Of course, these guides are somewhat absurd given the multiplexes he presents. With so many ways of seeing, how can any passage be trusted as but yet another fragment in flux?