Will Rogan's (b. 1975) multifaceted work often reflects on prosaic manifestations of time's passage that he identifies in his local environs, whether in a mural in Berkeley he passes regularly on his bike or on a coffee mug he drinks from in his studio. Primarily taking the form of photography, collage, sculpture, or video, Rogan's work possesses a subtlety and quietude that inspire thoughtful consideration of the material effects of time and space. For MATRIX 253, Rogan's first solo exhibition in a museum, the artist has created a new body of work that explores various time scales-past, present, and future-as evinced in a reversed order or a backward motion. The exhibition radiates conceptually from a video he collaborated on with his brother; together they staged and filmed an old white hearse exploding in extreme slow motion. Here the artist transforms the destruction of a universal symbol of death into a transcendental imagistic effect, revealing the usually invisible minutiae of the event. Several sculptures and photographs in the exhibition reflect an inverted state, including a picture of a ruler that measures length from right to left, made by his daughter, and a sculpture of a plastic camera from Time magazine that is a negation of itself. Rogan received his M.F.A. from UC Berkeley in 2006, and since then has exhibited widely both locally and internationally. For a recent series of photographs reproduced in the art journal cura., he captured all the objects that he made that left his studio, including personal gifts for loved ones and his own artwork. Throughout the process, the mundane was transfigured into a poetic work of art, as he infused an air of mystery into those everyday objects that shape personal experience. Since 2007, Rogan has coedited THE THING Quarterly with artist Jonn Herschend, producing objects by dozens of artists and writers including Allora & Calzadilla, Trisha Donnelly, and Trevor Paglen.
