JASON ROGENES: MEGALITECTRONIC
On View at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Maine
From October 26 to December 28, 2002

By Laurie Meunier Graves

Parents are often fond of saying that modern children have far too many toys and gadgets to clutter their minds and their rooms. All children really need to have fun—the thinking goes—are some cardboard boxes and a few art supplies. With some justification, most children, when they hear this, just roll their eyes.

Jason Rogenes, however, seems to have taken this advice to heart and has added Styrofoam for good measure; children everywhere would do well to take note. At the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Maine, Mr. Rogenes has done astonishing things with cardboard, Styrofoam, and fluorescent lights. This sort of huge, impermanent exhibit is usually called an installation, but it seems a woefully inadequate way to describe Megalitectronic. All sorts of descriptions come to mind—amazing, clever, exhilarating, creative—but none of them can really do justice to the actual experience of just being in this exhibit.

Megalitectronic is on the second floor, and as you go up the stairs the first thing that greets you is the overwhelming smell of cardboard. But then you look up, and the smell is forgotten. Hanging from the ceiling is a great Styrofoam creature lit from within. It has the sweep and feel of a Chinese dragon, but it could also be something from a science-fiction story. No matter. There it is, hovering from above. It somehow manages to look exactly like a string of large Styrofoam blocks while at the same time transcending the material from which it is made.

After gaping at the creature, you are then drawn to a series of cardboard pillars connected by a cardboard beam. They are immense, and they lead to an astounding cardboard structure, which, like everything else in this exhibit, is huge. This structure has the feel of a geodesic, the feel of a yurt, the feel of a set on Star Trek. Like the creature hanging outside, it is both ancient and futuristic at the same time.

Unlike so many exhibits, viewers are actually allowed to enter this one, to become immersed in it. The whole thing appears to be made of cardboard; there are big pieces with overlapping little ones, triangles, angles jutting out, and niches. In the center hangs what looks like the god of Styrofoam, square and totemic, and again, it is lit from within.

It seems odd to say that standing in the middle of a giant cardboard structure is energizing and exhilarating, but there it is. Mr. Rogenes may use “processed commodities of the pop-culture industry,” but the exhibit has a mythic feel. He shows how common, even discarded, materials in the right hands can be transformed into art.

 

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