For his second solo presentation at KALI Gallery Lucerne, Jason Rohr (*1999/CH), through painting and sculpture, continues expanding upon a polemic ridge of visuality. Taking the uncanny form of the nuclear family as an open theme, his works assume the role of props that materially and performatively enact the tropes and dynamics of art making and the artist’s figure.
One raised between the mutually exclusive poles of poor images seemingly disconnected from their meanings and origins. Like artifacts shed into the cloud of sociocultural movements that have already moved on with time. As well as the urge to contextualize and classify, stunting the real potential of hybrid forms.
Rohr uses various technologies and media through which his vocabulary echoes and becomes inscribed into the materials he uses. The cultural algorithm of the nuclear family is iterated through shaped canvases, pages of a fictional photo album, 3D modeled frames, and portraiture to compile a survey of how depictions of a fictitious family and their estate confluence into a synthetic nostalgia.
Coming of age in a time where technology gradually replaces certain aspects of human involvement, Rohr’s practice is informed by the shift of artmaking towards contextualizing content. His harnessing of both the classic conservatism of seven hundred years of painting and the digital, in his description of an ambiguous idea of what family is or can be, speaks to a visuality in constant flux.
He belongs to a generation that dis- or enchants generative technologies and their output through narratives and which exploits the models to amass content for their subcultural and hyper-specific archive-like feeds to inflate the subcultural into a dominant visual discourse.
