Rhythm Adjust

"Some time before disconnecting machines, unplugging huge motors as they whine and judder with various drawing utensils, I would spend a lot of time typing up various memories, some made up, or trying to keep up with some of my favourite films as I’d blend things they’d say with things they reminded me of. Something like the way William Burroughs would form his cut-ups, placing part of his inspiration on his mother and her interests in floristry.

I remember being younger back in Wolverhampton, sometimes on the weekend my dad would be working as an electrician, I would sometimes be playing around with some of the parts in the back of his van, connecting breaker switches to offcuts of wire, sellotaping them to another switch. In my head that became the trigger switch, and when triggered it would become a James Bond style gadget, able to listen in on the thoughts of those around me.

I now find myself at my studio in Brixton, twenty-seven years of age, working a large printing machine that I’ve spent the last year building and hacking so that it is able to extrude entire blocks of clay into sculptural forms, or when fitted with an etching needle, allow myself to connect these pathways to paper as figures emerge from the line-work.

In the same sense that Burroughs would cut up and reassemble sentences, or my dad would connect and disconnect circuits, I’m working to establish a language that not only navigates emerging processes, but also through their disconnecting, allow for a universal language to leak out.

The drawing began as a man using a fax machine, etched into a copper plate. But through a series of disconnects, and hand aquatinting, I find one man walking behind another, there seems to be something in his hand - I’m not sure what, some kind of pathway links them both together, but most surprisingly they turned out to be unicorns… the rare kind." - James Rogers, 2021

Rogers’ work explores figuration in the realm of the post digital, locating himself between his mostly self built technologies and the artist’s hand to explore the ecosystem that exists between us and the emerging digital/ physical landscape.
 

Accolades

Education: BA Fine Art, Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, London, 2016.

Recent Projects: Inner Space, Oliver Beer’s Studio, Soho, London, 2020Real People do Real Things, Nike Campaign for Airmax 90, 2019. A boom downloaded from the clouds, Olly Fathers & James Rogers, Arietta Chandris, Blowout Magazine, 2019.

Solo Exhibitions: James Rogers, Blue Shop Cottage, Camberwell, London, 2020.

Recent Exhibitions: The Other Art Fair Summer Edition, Kings’ Cross, London, 2019. This is the end? Candid Arts Trust, London, 2019. Why so yellow? Private residence exhibit, London, 2018. FBA Futures, Mall Galleries, London, 2018.

Awards: Fenton Arts Trust Development Grant, Awarded by the Fenton Arts Trust under patronage of Dame Maggie Smith, 2020. Mead Family Foundation, UAL, London 2015.

Artists in Lockdown, Instagram residency, London, Made at the request of Bramley Studio, and Scott Mead

www.james-rogers.co.uk
@jamesrogers_artist