Artwork by Airyka Rockefeller
May 3rd – June 22nd, 2014
Airyka Rockefeller’s current collage series immediately concedes its orientation in its title. Yes, Where With All is a play on words but it also acts as a compass, a tool that determines direction through a simple frame of reference. This title quickly points to ideas concerning the complexity of geography, universality, and inhabitation, and then ushers us into new worlds in which to find our way.
Rockefeller’s carefully assembled collages are minimal and haunting, and evoke feelings of familiarity and disorientation simultaneously. The expansive imagery of place and elements of architecture, the singular familiar patina, and the anonymous but distinct figures found in her photographic cuttings all converge together to create new, fantastical landscapes that reveal not just how big the world is but how differently we inhabit it, how strangely and beautifully we imagine versions of it for ourselves.
Rockefeller’s collages ask the viewer to be in two places at once— home and faraway, in transit and at rest, among the fantastical and the real, amidst our memories and our unknown futures, and to enter into all of these states with the same sense of awe and awareness.
– Nikki Grattan
