DIGITAL
CATALYSTS
By
Alessandra Santin
Translation
by Anna De Vita
…
there is nothing small, ugly or stupid,
everything is sacred and vulnerable…
H. Hesse La Cura
everything is sacred and vulnerable…
H. Hesse La Cura
The
work of Roy LaGrone is a punctual reflection on the contemporary gaze
called to a new, and in some ways extroardinary task. Indeed, if the age
of seeing has come to an end, the age we now live in is, for
the artist, the age of seeing again.
Seeing again means recovering the gaze – subjective and personal – by placing oneself in the correct perspective and, most importantly, by choosing what to see. Reality is a muddle from which to extrapolate objects, places, events and Roy LaGrone creates his personal world’s vision built as a puzzle of fragments. Revalued by the unusual point of view and by the new dimension that twists reality (what was usually small, far and insignificant becomes the protagonist of central spaces, often framed by discarded rubble of unexpected magnitude); childhood memories, the relation with the feminine world of the past, or glimpses of everyday life; these objects of the loved one acquire the strength of the symbol and saturate themselves with a powerful poetic meaning. The cotton harvested by his grandfather in the sunburned valleys of Pontotoc, Mississippi (fig. 1), or the combs, rollers and hairnets, the hair clips used by his mother in her hair salon (fig. 2), all become keys to access a place that ceases being a private space in order to be translated into a somewhere else for the many, the meaning of everybody’s dream.
The works of Roy LaGrone – as universal catalysts – besiege the man of tomorrow and save him from burning out too soon, from being suffocated by the needless giant nonsense imposed by the exterior. These are necessary experiments for the creation of infinite elements, laden with significant energy / poetic, on the edge of desire and the unconscious. Crossing the boundaries of the space dimension they serve as new gauges of Time, no longer dictated by the chronological (determined by the regular flow of instants one after the other), but seeking to determine the rhythm of the virtual breath of contemporary humanity. This is, for LaGrone, the only true journey in life. The journey that does not lead to new landscapes, but leads to new eyes, eyes and visions that the digital system and media language partially allow to show.
Proust would say: (living is) “seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes” they see, that they are. This appears to be the necessary gaze to understand the issues linked to the new and complex vision, open to the cyclic and circular dimension of the contemporary feminine.
Alessandra Santin, Art and Culture Critic, University of Padova and Trieste, Italy
Notes:
1. Hermann Hesse, La Cura 1925
2. Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière 1923
References:
fig. 1 Ship's Log #5240 (Sharecropper Reflections), 2005, digital C-print
fig. 2 Transporter Terminal D (Tribute to Delores), 2005, digital C-print
Seeing again means recovering the gaze – subjective and personal – by placing oneself in the correct perspective and, most importantly, by choosing what to see. Reality is a muddle from which to extrapolate objects, places, events and Roy LaGrone creates his personal world’s vision built as a puzzle of fragments. Revalued by the unusual point of view and by the new dimension that twists reality (what was usually small, far and insignificant becomes the protagonist of central spaces, often framed by discarded rubble of unexpected magnitude); childhood memories, the relation with the feminine world of the past, or glimpses of everyday life; these objects of the loved one acquire the strength of the symbol and saturate themselves with a powerful poetic meaning. The cotton harvested by his grandfather in the sunburned valleys of Pontotoc, Mississippi (fig. 1), or the combs, rollers and hairnets, the hair clips used by his mother in her hair salon (fig. 2), all become keys to access a place that ceases being a private space in order to be translated into a somewhere else for the many, the meaning of everybody’s dream.
The works of Roy LaGrone – as universal catalysts – besiege the man of tomorrow and save him from burning out too soon, from being suffocated by the needless giant nonsense imposed by the exterior. These are necessary experiments for the creation of infinite elements, laden with significant energy / poetic, on the edge of desire and the unconscious. Crossing the boundaries of the space dimension they serve as new gauges of Time, no longer dictated by the chronological (determined by the regular flow of instants one after the other), but seeking to determine the rhythm of the virtual breath of contemporary humanity. This is, for LaGrone, the only true journey in life. The journey that does not lead to new landscapes, but leads to new eyes, eyes and visions that the digital system and media language partially allow to show.
Proust would say: (living is) “seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes” they see, that they are. This appears to be the necessary gaze to understand the issues linked to the new and complex vision, open to the cyclic and circular dimension of the contemporary feminine.
Alessandra Santin, Art and Culture Critic, University of Padova and Trieste, Italy
Notes:
1. Hermann Hesse, La Cura 1925
2. Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière 1923
References:
fig. 1 Ship's Log #5240 (Sharecropper Reflections), 2005, digital C-print
fig. 2 Transporter Terminal D (Tribute to Delores), 2005, digital C-print
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