OF
ANCESTORS AND ANDROIDS
By
Kevin Sipp
Roy
LaGrone is an artist whose works stand poised between archetypal transatlantic
African culture and technological innovation. Through his use of 21st
century digital technology and his subversion of traditional art-making
modes he explores, expands, and explodes the myth of the natural
mystic. Looking to create works of art that speak to the material and
spiritual journeys of human beings with an ever increasing connection
to a mechanized world, LaGrone has embarked on creating a series of initiatory
videos that seek to document the process of his artistic and mystic coming
into being. By projecting data culled from his material mixed media works,
his post-material virtual images and documentation of his living/working
environment, LaGrone sets up a dialogue with the viewer concerning the
reality of ones surroundings and the significance of the rituals that
constitute the creative process. As a part of LaGrone’s process,
he uses unstable (transformative) materials that are destined to decay.
By scanning the detritus (dead matter) of material culture and recombining
them with virtual creations, he moves into a mode of production I will
call “resurrection aesthetics.”
LaGrone creates contemporary mythic vistas using as reference points (for his projections) everything from scanned skin, ancestral altars, graphitti, and the living myth of everyday living. He collapses all this data into a single animated space. The fact that he uses digital projection to preserve and reanimate the ghostly remains of his improvisational material works (works that are destroyed upon completion of the process) forces the viewing public to ponder the value of the process with the same weight that it would ponder the product the process has created (the Christ is not the crucifixion, but the journey to the cross).
As a child of Sun Ra's Astro-Black mythos, Miles Davis's obeah Jazz, dub and hip-hop's recombinant sonics; LaGrone absorbs and lives the ideals of the global traveler. The aesthetic principles of the African Diaspora exist in LaGrone's works not as final resting place but as a launching pad into a poly-visual, poly-cultural universe of symbols and sounds. These works are akin to that disgraced old discipline of alchemy. Balancing between science and séance, the sacred and the profane, these works capture the stages of its own creation (layer by digital layer), inhabited at once by Blade Runner ghosts in the machine and Marroon ghosts in the bush.
Many artists have used collage and projection to deconstruct and reconstruct the ritual moments of the human experience. LaGrone seeks to step out of the confines of the world altogether and step into the starry void. In his works the acoustic force of blues and bop give space to the play of digital bleeps and breaks where sci-fi, hi-fi and high-tech merge into a sensual rootedness. Roy LaGrone's work forces one to see the symbiotic relationship between the mystic and modern vision, between spiritual possession and digital progression, between oracles and operators.
So often in contemporary culture we are asked to choose “either/or” and never “both/and.” LaGrone's work collapses this binary falsity. By echoing his own process (through image capture, fabrication and reanimation) his works cannot be reduced to any one culture, philosophy, or aesthetic theory. These works are not a nostalgic journey into some dimly remembered promised land; but an invitation into a new territory where fragments of the past, present and future coexist; a realm of ancestors and androids singing future blues.
LaGrone creates contemporary mythic vistas using as reference points (for his projections) everything from scanned skin, ancestral altars, graphitti, and the living myth of everyday living. He collapses all this data into a single animated space. The fact that he uses digital projection to preserve and reanimate the ghostly remains of his improvisational material works (works that are destroyed upon completion of the process) forces the viewing public to ponder the value of the process with the same weight that it would ponder the product the process has created (the Christ is not the crucifixion, but the journey to the cross).
As a child of Sun Ra's Astro-Black mythos, Miles Davis's obeah Jazz, dub and hip-hop's recombinant sonics; LaGrone absorbs and lives the ideals of the global traveler. The aesthetic principles of the African Diaspora exist in LaGrone's works not as final resting place but as a launching pad into a poly-visual, poly-cultural universe of symbols and sounds. These works are akin to that disgraced old discipline of alchemy. Balancing between science and séance, the sacred and the profane, these works capture the stages of its own creation (layer by digital layer), inhabited at once by Blade Runner ghosts in the machine and Marroon ghosts in the bush.
Many artists have used collage and projection to deconstruct and reconstruct the ritual moments of the human experience. LaGrone seeks to step out of the confines of the world altogether and step into the starry void. In his works the acoustic force of blues and bop give space to the play of digital bleeps and breaks where sci-fi, hi-fi and high-tech merge into a sensual rootedness. Roy LaGrone's work forces one to see the symbiotic relationship between the mystic and modern vision, between spiritual possession and digital progression, between oracles and operators.
So often in contemporary culture we are asked to choose “either/or” and never “both/and.” LaGrone's work collapses this binary falsity. By echoing his own process (through image capture, fabrication and reanimation) his works cannot be reduced to any one culture, philosophy, or aesthetic theory. These works are not a nostalgic journey into some dimly remembered promised land; but an invitation into a new territory where fragments of the past, present and future coexist; a realm of ancestors and androids singing future blues.
Kevin
Sipp is an artist, curator, poet; and also a writer and lecturer on contemporary
and African American art. He is Curator at the Hammonds House Museum and
Resource Center of African American Art in Atlanta, Georgia.
©
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, ROY LAGRONE | CONTACT