"Airyka Rockefeller: Crooked Meadow At Jack Fischer Gallery" Artweek Magazine Vol. 39 By DeWitt Cheng July/August 2008

In 2005 the photographer Airyka Rockefeller made a series of photographs of crumpled, discarded clothing that explore the idea of cast skins and metamophoses. With their collapsed, telescoped sleeves looking owlishly up at the implicitly standing viewer, the clothes had a comic and forlorn aspect, as, colling to room temperature, they relapsed into inanimate objecthood. Shed skins make good analogies: Artworks are the physical by-products of creative metapmorphosis. Artists assimilate the environment (or at least interesting aspects of it), and then move on, leaving behind phantom images, distillates or syntheses of world and self.

Ovidian and hymenopteran metaphors aside, all art inevitably reveals its creator, and Rockefeller, with a varied background in photography, cultural history, anthropology and film studies, has a complex view of what she wants to achieve. She works in many media--photos, films, photo books and writing--and, seeking multicultural perspective and wisdom, she travels extensively. She has lived with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh families and even at a home for Untouchable girls during her year in India and her two trips to Lithuania documented the karmic rehabiliation of a forest steeped in bloody history which has recently been repurposed as a recreation ground.

Rockefeller is interested in charged landscapes, "where the manifesations of the physical and the psychological overlap, and where...the recent and the residual, the theatrical and the happenstance merge." The imagery she seeks thus suggests "the simultaneous manifestation and disappearance of history."

Photography can be well suited for such explorations, combining as it does, in San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker's words, "noticing and sharing in a single form." Crooked Meadow, the photo series Rockefeller made in 2006 while exploring non-touristic spots in the Czech Republic, demonstates both her curiousity about her surroundings and her intuitive, even somewhat mystical approach to them. Roger Caillois, whom she cites as an influence, theorized that schizophrencics are "literally subsumed by space ... They experience a loss of bodily boundary. They are unable to distinguish between outside and inside, or between flesh and the world." In our current digitized, sanitized, symbolic-analyst culture, such infustions of eccentric, messy reality are welcome--at least in the safe, cathartic theater of art.

Rockefeller memorably depicts worldly untidiness in all its absurd glory in The Auto Body whose grimy red sedan is stacked with what appears to be detritus from a leaky trunk, a sodden-sleeping bag, a sagging cardboard box and other proto-landfill. Similarly, The Cloaked Rocks has strange, white, slabs garbed in a sinister black tarp and gathered into a figure, its head darkened, its chest bearing the shadow of a cross or ankh. The Chameleon's Mirror offers and oblique view of a mirror reflecting a corner of the room, a window, and clothing hung from nails, while its surface is festooned with tiny floating stickers--a globe, a candle and two angels. The Provocateur shows a man dining amid a clutter of bottles and chairs, his head in a plastic bag, and The Hunting House's cabin on stilts seems to pause mid-stride as it seeks its forest prey, while in the parody triptic The Yellow Furs, three non-too-appealing carpets hang to dry on a sullen day.

In an earlier series of self-portraits, Rockefeller moved continuously during long shutter exposures in order to create ethereal presences that "slipped like air or vapor out from under the solidity of the body." A future series will explore "temporary homes...places I have inhabited in transition as I have moved between homes. Whether they are ships, walking paths or trains, they are spaces I occupied en route elsewhere." Motion and transience are the messy thematic materials from which Rockefeller makes her paradoxical art of mysterious transcendent stasis.

Airyka Rockefeller: Crooked Meadow closed in May at Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco.

DeWitt Cheng is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.