'Untitled', from the series 'Bear', 2003
48x60
Hawaiian-born artist Kent Rogowski gives poignancy and personality to mundane toys and whimsical objects. Toys and games are commonly intended to provide creative escape, but the objects Rogowski playfully appropriates evoke nothing more imaginative or stimulating than visions of last-minute purchases and forgotten minor amusements.
The jigsaw puzzles and plush teddy bears that Rogowski adopts, customizes and displays might be new, but they are also identical to the cheaply made, casually purchased and easily forgotten objects gathering dust in people's basements and closets. Yet through his creative intervention, Rogowski renders these functionless objects into unique and thoughtful works of art.
Rogowski's series of re-ordered jigsaw puzzles toy with the ideals of control, perfection and order that underline our attraction to putting irregularly shaped cardboard pieces into some pre-determined pattern. Mixing and cobbling together pieces from forty separate jigsaw puzzles, Rogowski creates eight fresh montages of fauna, flora, water and sky. His brand-new impossible landscapes are testaments to artistic creativity within strict boundaries, and also evidence the comfort many people derive from playing by the rules.
'Untitled,' 2006
16x20
Rogowski's series of snowglobes similarly pay generous homage to neat, conservative lives lived on a small scale. Snowglobes are objects traditionally meant to inspire daydreams and nostalgic reverie. In his classically constructed globes, Rogowski replaces their tiny models of big, flashy, fancy cities or glamorous tableux with scenes of bureaucrats roaming through cubicles, couples awkwardly interacting or children playing. Like the extra snapshots taken on a role of film, these snowglobes commemorate unremarkable events and, by freezing the moments, grant them the illusions of permanence and importance.
With the same spirit, Rogowski purchased ordinary mass-produced teddy bears, unstuffed them, turned them inside out and then re-stuffed. With their interiors on the outside, their eyes are replaced by the fasteners securing the plastic to the fabric, the stitches connecting parts become expressive lines and their seams appear like scars. He then photographed them and presents their portraits in one complete series to invite comparisons between each of the goofy and vulnerable looking characters. In this process, Rogowski highlights the ways that the toys in their original form function as generic symbols of the commoditization of emotion. And by deconstructing the bears' banally saccharine appearance, Rogowski enables each one to become special and genuinely lovable for itself.
To see more of Ken Rogowski's work click here to visit his Your Gallery profile page.
Ana Finel Honigman
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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