| Sarah Dotts: Tell us about growing up and working as an artist in Dallas. What is the art scene like in Dallas and Forth Worth? Can you discuss some of the galleries, groups and curators who support contemporary art there?
Jason Roskey: Well, I grew up south of Fort Worth, which is a world very far removed from Dallas, if located only about 50 miles away. Fort Worth has some great institutions—The Modern and The Kimball. Unfortunately, the art scene in Dallas is what one might expect: somewhat conservative and often looking to the country’s other art centers for what to make, what to collect and how to operate. |
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Toward New Urban Landscapes – Sarah Dotts
Sarah Dotts: Tell us about growing up and working as an artist in Dallas. What is the art scene like in Dallas and Forth Worth? Can you discuss some of the galleries, groups and curators who support contemporary art there?
Jason Roskey: Well, I grew up south of Fort Worth, which is a world very far removed from Dallas, if located only about 50 miles away. Fort Worth has some great institutions—The Modern and The Kimball. Unfortunately, the art scene in Dallas is what one might expect: somewhat conservative and often looking to the country’s other art centers for what to make, what to collect and how to operate.
I was never involved too deeply in the Dallas scene. Usually, the younger artists and curators graduate from Dallas and move to LA or New York. There is a small handful of artists doing some interesting things, but much of what’s shown in Dallas tends to skew towards the overdone, minimal and glossy paintings.
In my time there, I showed with the now defunct Pigeon Stone Project. The shows were put on by curator/artist Sarah Jane Semrad in older loft buildings, vacated performance halls and other spaces. She’s now working on a residency called La Reunion, which should be beneficial for that community.
SD: What about Brooklyn drew you there from Texas?
JR: I came to New York for the same reasons most artists come to New York. Even though the city has become a less-than-hospitable place for artists to work in recent years, it’s still the world’s biggest stage. I had planned on moving here for a while. I knew I couldn’t stay in Texas and make the work I wanted to make.
SD: How has your art changed since moving to New York one year ago?
JR: I’ve been making the same landscape-based drawings for a few years now, and some sculptures using found building materials. I think the first thing an artist realizes when coming to New York, especially from the South, is the abundance of resources. For someone like me, who is interested in the energy of urban life, architectural ruins, urban decay and the heavy imprint that the powerful make destroying and rebuilding cities to their liking, there’s no better place to be.
Since moving here, collage has become much more prevalent in my drawings, which were primarily graphite renderings of mountainous landscapes before. I realized I could free things up here, and approach the work in a less controlled, conceptual way.
SD: Could you discuss collage and why you have chosen it as your primary medium? If you would, please comment on how you re-contextualize the images and make them new.
JR: There’s something romantic about using scrap materials, whether it is magazine cutouts or found objects hauled home from a demolition site. In the end, fine art exists as the ultimate luxury item; so to take those materials and make something that’s new and beautiful just seems like a responsible thing for me to do as an artist. I have no desire to spend my days at the local art store dropping large amounts of money on oil paint.
My images are culled primarily from arts and culture publications, fashion magazines, travel brochures and general news magazines. I sometimes draw graphite nature scenes or use photocopies of notable world landscapes and structures in the work.
I’m specifically looking for a few particular images that often include war-torn areas, political iconography and images from fashion shoots. It’s interesting how fashion has become the high art form of our society. You can walk down any street in Manhattan or Williamsburg and that is how people are expressing themselves in this American era of hyper-consumerism. I don’t think I am trying to make political images; I’m more interested in using political and cultural elements of the present to make these worlds that appear both utopian and apocalyptic to the viewer. I’ve also noticed that more and more of my cutouts are of decaying buildings. I find that interesting—salvaged images of materials soon to be salvaged.
SD: Do you find interesting cutouts from magazines along the way and keep a stockpile in your studio, or do you work with particular pieces for a single work?
JR: I know what images I’m looking for so the process has become more efficient. Luckily in my neighborhood, I can walk down the street and find the right publications on the curb tied up in a bundle waiting to be recycled. I don’t like clutter, so I usually go through them immediately and tear out the pages and return them to the curb. I work both ways—the process usually starts out as very controlled, I select certain pieces that I think work together and then move on to making marks and adding elements as I see fit.
SD: Can you identify some of the main themes you address? How have they changed as you develop artistically?
JR: I like to leave that up to the viewer. There are things I’m interested in that I do think can be construed from the work, and those include Americana, architecture, power, environmentalism, frontier settlement and youth culture to name a few.
I find the level of complacency in American society right now very interesting. I find it amazing that more citizens are not pissed off and voicing their feelings on how this country is currently being governed and how we attempt to influence others around this world to accept those ideals.
That leads to some of the more recent work I’ve completed, which deals with the notion of identity. Warhol alluded to an era when everyone could be a star, and it seems that, in today’s technologically advanced and money-frenzied America, we have arrived. Exhibitionism is the order of the day. I’m working on a series of landscapes that incorporates faceless, often-hooded cutout figures and that confronts the lack of importance of identity that is the present.
SD: Tell us about some of the choices you made when you created Untitled, 2006 (I’m referring to the wood panel with a cow teetering on stripes).
JR: Can I say I just thought it looked cool? Actually, that’s an emaciated horse on top of a cutout of a faceless politician (I won’t say who), arm held high in front of an American flag. The flag continues to be a reoccurring theme for me. I find it interesting how it can cause such a range of emotions for different citizens often based on nationality, race, class and political affiliation. I’m currently working on a large collage and sculpture that incorporates pieces of a cut-up 48-star American flag. That’s where I want to take things—turning the collages into three-dimensional installations. I have to find a way to make these images I’ve created more immediate.
