Justin Raphael Roykovich, Personal Portfolio 2022

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In 2011, I co-founded an artist's collective named "re:collective", where we focus on light and video installations around the Washington DC and New York areas. We install the work in public places, where it can be viewed through any glass surface, such as windows looking onto a street or into a larger, enclosed space. The work I do within the collective has been an enormous influence on the work I do in my personal practice, in exploring boundaries between bodies in light, time and space. We use light as a medium, exploring the effects of the spectrum on these bodies that pass through it. We use a thin layer of plastic as a membrane that fog from a commercial fog machine is then sealed in. This creates illusions of depth and allows the figures to undulate on the clouds produced by the fog, bringing into question memories, transience and realms that exists between the physical. (Click here for more.)

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I have been producing an ongoing series of photographs that document my hometown in northern New Jersey. The cloudiness of my childhood serves as direct influence into the work I make currently. My rural hometown is considered to be an epicenter of "weirdness" for the state, and it leaves an indelible mark on my psyche with the folklore of the townspeople and the corresponding immersion into the physical and emotional environment. (Click here for more)

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Annually, for the past several years, I have made it a point to do a road trip to an area in the United States that I have never experienced. Most recently, I completed a trip through the northern plains of the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming. Last year, I went to explore the entirety of California, from Los Angeles to Death Valley to the Bay Area, then back to LA. Before that, I drove around Arizona, Utah and Nevada. I am just now, while I am in Galveston, starting to delve into the photos I have been taking of the recent American landscape. I am very interested in what these places mean in terms of a current American psyche, but also for myself as a queer entity traveling through them in this specific time. These landscapes are as foreign to me physically as they are to psychically, as alien as a literal other world, even as an American who has had the persona of these lands fitted to me like a dancing tights - like, I should say, most other (perhaps white) Americans. I wish to use the landscape to dive into the foggy earth of consciousness, as a familiar yet foreign experience to explore how our environments shape who we are on a psychic level. This is especially of importance in 2017 as the changes happening in the U.S. are so divisive. While progress goes in and out like a social tide pulled by the gravity political reality stars, the landscape remains as an ideological mass that defines & defies the nostalgia of what America used to be - and perhaps what it could be still if we stop destroying it. (Click here for more.)

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I am heavily interested in the physical and ephemeral manifestations of light and line in 4D spacetime. While drawing lines through space, especially within an inherently 4D process such as photography, the line is able to exist beyond a two dimensional plane and is capable of tying together relationships and connections, as well as playing a fundamental role in trajectories and mapping. Through ephemeral marks, I use these conceptual linear ideas in conjunction with the properties of light in a scientific sense - the speed that light can travel in, its capability of holding information, and its essential function as a universal constant. (Click here for more)

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After 8 months of research, this installation uses relational objects of the site itself to build an environmental recollection of all the history that is encompassed in one geographical location, attempting to fold layers of spacetime down upon itself. The site was a large military complex that has documented reports of hauntings. Using light and line, I connect back to my research of the inhabitants and their history within the space. This installation researches and maps not only my relationship to the site, but also the relationship to the hundreds of employees and community members that occupied the space in the 1940s. (Click here for more.)

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Using a piece of ghost-hunting equipment that relays phonetic words based on electromagnetic readings of its surroundings, I use those words to weave a web of correlations back to my research through time, deciphering forgotten or hidden histories of the site. This device may produce any number of words, from names to numbers to materials. My research included pouring over a self-published newspaper that was produced in the 1940's at this site. I used the device to gather names and information that I could then physically draw a line to in my research, using the device as a potential transmitter of information from the present back to the past.

A personal coincidence happened for me as well during this project - through family research, I became aware of a previously unknown fact that my paternal grandmother worked in a factory during World War 2 to produce nylon parachute line - an almost identical material to what I inherently used in this series. (Click here for more.)

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Using long exposure photography, I document the way that light travels through a certain spaces within the site which create abstract photographs of the results. (Click here for more.)

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My family has a long and complicated history with World War 2. My paternal grandfather was one of the first group of allied soldiers to liberate Dachau, and was subsequently tasked with photographically documenting the atrocities of the holocaust there. My father in turn was heavily interested in World War 2 history, and the sounds of various documentaries and wartime movies fogged the audible air of my childhood. My father and I have never been close, in part because we operate on very different sides of a masculinity scale. This defunct torpedo became an ideal representation of failed machismo and phallic aggression for me, while holding all the nuances of what masculinity can mean to various people. The factory that built this specific weapon was known for producing duds that would either miss their targets or fail to explode upon impact. Within this performance is also light from a ghost-hunting tool that is meant to help decipher spirits as they might move in space. (Click here for more.)

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Using long exposure photography, I use an infrared + ultra violet ghost hunting light to record the measuring of 4D spacetime, dancing along side the steps of the acknowledged entities that may exist between realms on the site. This also serves as a way to use physical light and line to map a space or a site. (Click here for more.)

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This is The InBetween, a performance persona I have adopted while investigating geographic locations. I'm interested in areas between opposing poles: positive/negative, black/white, male/female, living/dead. The InBetween is a shifting contemporary conductor that acts as a channel between these opposite sides and the performance work I do acts as the interpreter between them. (Click here for more.)

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Eventually The InBetween dissolves and just the husk of the uncanny nature of being remains, cyclically passing back and forth through an indeterminate membrane of innate human consciousness facing empirical reasoning: an interpretation of energy. (Click here for more.)

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I began using neon nylon line as a stand-in for light to draw in 3D/4D space. During an outdoor installation of one drawing, European Garden Spiders started using the line to assist them in building their webs. There is now an ongoing conversation between the properties of light, line and communication that happens in the ways spiders use their webs through vibration and the way light travels and can carry similar communicative possibilities. (Click here for more.)

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Both light and line are important to me. Line, as one of the main aesthetic foundations in visual communication. Light, or rather the photons that make up light, is one of the few instances in the universal constants where something that has no mass can travel great distances. Usually, we humans mark the passage of time by the unconscious documentation by the brain of mass moving through space. Even most of the sub-atomic particles carry some kind of mass. Therefore if photons can travel at great speeds, and be very definition of a universal constant for a measurement of distance, it begs the question of what other undiscovered massless groups can do the same.

The uncanny or sublime notion of what light can hold is inherently important in this work as well, stemming back to my experiences while growing up in a haunted house. Ghost lights are common throughout folklore, such as the will-o’-the-wisps, with their menacing ways of leading wayward wanderers from safe paths. Light is capable of showing us a path, illuminating it, documenting it and also destroying it. In quantum physics, photons particles hold dual properties that make them almost impossible to be spatially localized. It is through this idea of transference between two distinct but shifting qualities that I find myself attempting to operate in my own InBetween state. Light can be two separate physical and ephemeral ideas, but also exist in one state at the same time. Within my work, I operate through that InBetween, to document the "physical but not," using light and line to connect relationships from the here and now, then back to the past. (Click here for more.)

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This project was the culmination of two years of research and study at Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts. Working with the history of the site and the community that used the site, I created an installation based on the community's experiences of the uncanny within the building. The installation was comprised of found objects, including a car bumper that was abandoned on the property that I suspended in the gallery. The installation also included video interviews from community members that documented their own history and how it intertwined with the history of the site. The gallery that this work was presented in was a former house, and there was an installation built for several rooms. This is an image of one of those rooms. (Click here for more.)

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I have been documenting both the street art of "tagging" as well as intended long-exposure experimentations. This stems from my intrigue in using light as a communicative substance in things like fiber optics, in relationship to the inherent physical properties that light possesses as a universal constant. (Click here for more.)

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This piece is a part of a larger installation I did called “The Holy Darkness,” which is my most recently completed project. This project allowed me an opportunity to have a full solo show that encompassed a very large, three-tiered gallery space with work that connected all three floors. While preparing, I had heard a rabbi describe the time before God created the light as “The Holy Darkness” - that the void was not in fact empty as some modern religious dogma would have us believe. Instead, before the light, the black void was pure God. Being a human who has consistently dealt with bouts of depression, I began to think of both a human’s consciousness and their relationship to negative space in a different way. Using the same neon cord, throughout the gallery, I began to tie together disparate objects, of beauty, death and being - tracing through the correlations one makes not through an empty negative space, but through that which fills the locality around objects: a path of life. (Click here for more.)

Questions from students in MUSI 379 - “Creativity Up Close”, Rice University, Spring 2020:

Q: In one of the pictures you mentioned that you used long exposure photography to capture the light travelling and I was wondering what that meant and how/when to utilize it?

Q: When you build the installations, do you already have in mind how you would like to photograph them, and construct them based on that? Or is that something you consider after they're done?

Q: I really like the photos on your "dark matters" page (http://www.jrroykovich.com/dark-matters) especially the super colorful ones like "Melonball" and "Sherbert Swirl". It looks like you can see the sky in the background. How do you achieve the colors in the foreground? Is it natural or editing or some combination?

Q: What editing software/program do you use for your photos?

Currently Pondering: 
12/07/16 The Universe Is Flat - Now What? (via Space.com)
12/04/16 We Survive Because Reality May Be Nothing Like We Think It Is (via BigThink)
06/30/16 Scientists discover fundamental property of light - 150 years after Maxwell (via The Conversation)
01/14/16 Let's Rethink Space - Does space exist without objects, or is it made by them? (via Nautilus) 

To view a portfolio of student work, please click here.