Golden Death Chant from Morgan Sorne on Vimeo.
New Characters Emerge from Emily the Strange Creator Rob Reger
November 8, 2010. Rob Reger, the force behind the iconic Emily the Strange character, opens a solo show at Switcheroo in Pasadena on November 20. The show titled: FACING STRANGE: the Characters of Rob Reger showcases Reger’s recent painting series of interlocking characters and whimsical design. The opening reception is from 7-10pm; Reger’s experimental band Beno + Minnie will play a short set that evening. The show runs through January 15 by appointment.
In this body of work, Reger’s trademark bold graphic design is repurposed and dosed with a colorful serving of psychedelia to reveal a world of new friends and beasts. Subtle narratives emerge, playfully tapping into mysticism, optical illusions, and hallucinations. In a similar vein as Reger’s love of word play, hidden messages, and backward masking, FACING STRANGE demonstrates a balance of opposing forces with characters and shapes all intended for viewing in multiple directions.
Switcheroo is run by artists Amanda Visell and Michelle Valigura. It’s located near the intersection of South Raymond and California, in Pasadena.
FACING STRANGE: the Characters of Rob Reger
Opening: Saturday, November 20th (7-10 PM)
November 21- January 15, by appointment
Switcheroo Workshop & Gallery
543-b S Raymond
Pasadena, CA 91105
www.myswitcheroo.com
Gallery contact: hi@myswitcheroo.com
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ROB REGER
Rob Reger is the founder, owner, creative director and president of Cosmic Debris - a design house based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rob and Cosmic introduced the world to Emily the Strange, now an international icon for empowering young alternative girls. Rob has been designing Emily for over a decade and has generated millions of fans of the character. Emily’s voice and image can be found in at 37 countries, through the outlets of Chronicle books, series of Harper Collins novels, Dark Horse Comics, an Epiphone guitar, a clothing line, and an upcoming live action film with Universal Pictures and the Producer of the Hellboy series, 30 Days of Night, and The Mask.
Reger and Cosmic Debris grew out of the DIY punk and guerrilla art aesthetic of the eighties in Southern California, and a fondness for the surrealist art movement. He continues to mix bold graphic design with a pop culture sensibility. Reger holds a B.F.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a M.F.A. in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. His paintings, printmaking, watercolors, and collage have been shown in galleries around the world. Outside of Emily and art-making, Reger plays music with his fiancé Aimee Friberg in their experimental band Beno + Minnie.
Mark your calendars for next Friday, October 1st when Strangerous, an exhibition in collaboration with Rob Reger opens at Creative Growth in Oakland. Reger is a Bay Area artist and the creative force behind illustrated heroine, Emily the Strange (he's also Gallery Extraña's co-founder). Strangerous features artwork by Creative Growth artists: Cedric Johnson, David Albertsen, Dinah Shapiro, Donald Mitchell, Franna Lusson, Gail Lewis, George Wilson, Jade Saren, John Martin, Juan Aguilera, Merritt Wallace, Nick Pagan andRodney Ridge . Also featuring Rob Reger’s own ‘rotating paintings.’ Exhibition is on view October 1 – November 12, 2010.
The metaphysical poet Robert Herrick compared artists to amphibians, since they both live in dual realms, wet/dry and real/imagined. In recent years, art theorists diagnosed our schizophrenic condition as a split between nature and culture (no doubt due to Original Sin), and most artists found the new, exciting media frontier infinitely more fascinating than tired old nature, already done to death in more ways than one. Then things unraveled. Nowadays, socially engaged art practices are lauded, and even though 1930s-style social realism is still scorned, opining that art can be more than flippant nihilism no longer causes sighs and rolling eyes.
Gina Borg and Bryan de Roo are former Boston University classmates who are showing their paintings under the umbrella title, Temples of Transition, which some might construe as endorsing critic Suzi Gablik's goal of "re-enchanting" and re-sacralizing a fallen art world. Both construct fields of repeated (but varied) abstract marks that explore pattern, structure and growth; both create in order to explore process, but their paintings become metaphors for psychic integration — not exactly the Prime Directive of capitalist or postmodernist sophisticates.
Borg's nearly monochromatic paintings call for and foster a becalmed meditative state. Their carefully modulated tessellated brushstrokes suggest lustrous tapestries and embroidered brocades, subtly changing in texture and sheen, and natural structures like waves, tree bark, and field grasses — or scientific specimens, magnified. She describes her paintings as "process-driven experiments in color, light and the power of incremental change ... [created by] mutating the tones and temperatures of just a few colors ... the nuanced, physical remnants of ... slowing down ... perception." "Big Pink," "Floe," "White Mountain, "Berg," and "Balm" are minimalist nature paintings that ask the viewer to perceive change in the changeless, and vice versa.
While Borg's ethereal works seem to have been breathed into existence, de Roo's indeterminate structures suggest improvisation and evolution. Borg discerns "UFOs, architecture, crabs, robots and insects"; others might discover road maps, origami papers, botanical and biological slides, engineering diagrams, circuit charts, and plan views of archaeological sites. The ambiguity is deliberate: de Roos says he seeks "a pregnancy, a fecundity, like this could be so many things." What his twelve "Thought Bubble — Crystal Mesh" paintings depict is more elusive and abstract: how painting and thinking operate "by way of crystallization and interweaving." They're portraits of the creative process. Temples of Transition runs through June 19 at Gallery Extraña (2912 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley). 510-845-3645 X217 or Gallery-Extrana.com
Reposted from:
frontroom - salon/performance space
Artist Bryan de Roo with Julia Shirar
Deborah Kirklin and Robert Poplack
Dominic East, Emily Nathan, Jake Huffman
Gallery owner/director Aimee Friberg with Susan Hollander
Mirissa Neff
Aimee, Christian, Rob Reger
Artist Gina Borg with Gallery Extrana co-owner Rob Reger
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Bryan de Roo, Thought Bubble - Crystal Mesh, 22 x 28”, oil on linen
Gina Borg, Thicket 1, 12 x 17.5", ink & graphite on paper
