John Rogers "Prototype # 1" wood & wing nuts, 29 3/4 x 29 x 2 in. 75.6 x 73.7 x 5.1 cm

"STRUCTURES & ATMOSPHERES"

new sculpture & paintings 

John Rogers  
David Ivan Clark  

Opening Reception for the artists :
Saturday February 15th, 5:00 - 8:00 pm    

February 15  - March 8, 2025

David Ivan Clark, "Adoratorio # 38", oil on Baltic Birch, 30 x 30 in. 76.2 x 76.2 cm

R.B. Stevenson Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition, “STRUCTURES & ATMOSPHERES” new sculpture by San Diego artist John Rogers and paintings by Arizona artist David Ivan Clark. We cordially invite you to the opening reception on Saturday, February 15th, from 5 to 8 p.m. This is a unique opportunity to meet the artists and gain insights into their creative process.

John Rogers is an artist and professor emeritus at San Diego State University (SDSU), known for his work that often explores themes of identity, memory, and the intersection of technology and art. His artistic practice spans a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, and digital art, with a particular emphasis on interactive elements that engage the viewer. experiences. At SDSU, John Rogers has contributed to both the academic and artistic communities by teaching and mentoring students, inspiring them to push boundaries in their own creative practices. As an educator, he has been known for encouraging experimentation and fostering a collaborative environment where students can explore both traditional and contemporary methods of making. Rogers has exhibited his work widely, and his pieces often challenge conventional ideas of art-making by incorporating technology, multimedia elements, and conceptual approaches.

David Ivan Clark paintings hover in the space between romantic landscape and weathered industrial artifact. They dwell in limbo, each marking the spot where nostalgia collides with fact, where celebration and elegy converge. From a distance the paintings present land, sky and nothing more. Held up to the turbulent flux of the mechanized world, they offer refuge. As one draws near, however, bucolic illusion becomes fugitive: deep space collapses to surface; distant horizon reverts to paint, pitted and scoured; serene haven, glimpsed as if on film, old, grainy and scratched, dissolves to abstraction. The vast, silent plains of western Canada, where David Ivan Clark was born and raised, inform both his life and work. As a child David felt the numinous in the natural world which surrounded him. Fast-forward to the post-modern age in which we are asked to view the world, not as independent from and external to ourselves, but as internal construct flung outwards. We no longer inhabit the world but our own shimmering projections. From this vantage, the existence of the natural sanctuary he inhabited as a child, which sustains him still, is called into question. David's work explores this dilemma.