Search results for 'Terry Rodgers' at the museum of art

Rodgers is an accomplished painter with a striking mastery of light and transitions as is evidenced by his current body of work. This work focuses on the life of the upper-middle-class Americans, seemingly adrift in affluence and casualness, unsatisfied and disconnected. Nonetheless, Rodgers's work remains firmly rooted in life class drawing, necessitating the use of, and contact with, human models. Rodgers asks friends, acquaintances, professional models, and, sometimes, total strangers, to pose for him in a photography session. He then builds a scenario in a painting by pulling together elements from a wide array of photographs. His rendering of an imaginary leisure life stands as an iconic vision of the tensions and confusion endemic to today's society. The resulting images are not snapshots or slices of life, not verite records of actual moments in actual families or party situations, or diaristic records of his family life, but carefully constructed and composited fictions, designed to elicit the most meaning and sustain the maximum amount of ambiguity. The seductive and marvelous glamour of the outer world jars against the vulnerability and delicacy of our inner and private selves. From spectacular large oil canvases and mixed media to stark photo-portraits and kaleidoscopic videos, Rodgers’ work both collapses and emphasizes psychic distance and physical proximity. It suggests that, in a world of ready-made entertainment, there’s an underlying uncertainty and a sense that something is missing.
Cutting edge art and the figurative is again avant-garde in the paintings by Terry Rodgers. The viewer is at the same time a voyeur and a guest at the party, but an existential calm reigns in the paintings. Rodgers is a master of composition.