Rick Oginz

As an artist I am motivated by science, technology, and my immediate surroundings. I have been making sculpture and drawings for over 5 decades and I am a recent transplant to the Bay Area. By employing both pop iconography and imagery culled from my immediate settings, I generate multimedia work that examines modern and timeless modalities of transportation, communication, and identity. The work is concerned with the play between formal representation of objects, our environment, and the imagined space. I strive to articulate place in unexpected ways, and activate the inanimate. The physical aspects of my work reflect these themes and ambitions. Manipulation of scale is central to the work; I juxtapose the minute with the infinite by adjusting the natural scale of commonplace things, and create the illusion of multiple dimensions in the two dimensional plane. These tactics are applied in an effort to subvert the viewer’s expectations and extend the levity, and often the absurdity related to the subject matter. There is humor in many aspects of the work, for example: a flat screen TV fabricated from wood showing San Francisco’s skyline with a cluster of drones overhead, or a drawing of a container ship sinking in the corner of my studio. Many of my drawings depict spaces where the relationship between the outside and the inside generate tension and illustrate social, and physical landscape in one breath. Interior views characterize my drawings but do not comprise the entirety of the work. Many drawings contain a single emblematic image, such as a hand holding a cell phone. The purpose of this representation is to define objects that are significant to our nature, and progress as a species. As a maker, I seek to convey my observations of the ever – changing landscape of our species’ progression. 

 

For more information about the artist, please visit his website.