JR Roykovich - Personal Works Portfolio of Major Projects, 2024-2025
This portfolio is intended to be viewed online, and can be found at the following URL:
https://www.jrroykovich.com/jrr-personal-work-portfolio-2024-2025

Project 1:

Travel in Light Years:
Artifacts & devices adapted to
traverse the precarious spectrum
In/Between
Homofuturism and the superannuated
as an exile in a land
of glorious f/utility
Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX
2022

Travel in Light Years was a large solo show held at the gallery at the Galveston Artist Residency from August 27th - November 5th, 2022. This multifaceted installation with varying media was designed to interact with the natural sunlight that enters the space throughout the duration of the day. As the Earth rotates, beams of light from the sun coming through a large windows engage suspended artifacts excavated from around the gallery venue, hung using neon twine. The windows were coated with a dichromatic film that created different hues depending on light intensity, relating to the time of day. Two “sails” are at either end, and were billowed by hanging box fans. A fog machine was suspended with the artifacts to provide a density to the air, allowing the light to be opaque.

Working in installation, I generally rarely make individual pieces of art, instead opting to work by project, where many different facets of media come together to make one whole. The work utilizes photography, video, mark making, performance and installation to document and explore psychic environments of intersections, systems and networks through time while using myself as a queer coded conduit. For this particular body of work, I was working with the site to explore an idea “interplacement,” or what it is like to embody realities at different points in time. The majority of artifacts in the piece were excavated from open building sites from around Galveston Island, where it is incredibly easy to find a material history literally just below the surface of ground. Those artifacts were then hung in the shape of a vessel, a device to help traverse a voyage of inner and outer space. Using this vessel, it is an exploration that results in a large mapping based off of environmental recollection which serves as a nerve center to explore, document, and connect various personal and collective histories.

Total Gallery Space: Approx. 42' x 32' x 14'

Press for Travel in Light Years (each photo is linked):

Project 2:

Potentia // Actualitas
Throughline, Houston, Texas
2024
In collaboration with Cindee Travis Klement

Ether // Ecotone

in response to Pontentia // Acualitas at Throughline

April 19 - May18. 2024

by Jeremy Samuel Johnson

At work this time of year I can see several chrysalises hanging about the door. The first week, I take moments to observe how they hang by short silvery lines. Two weeks later, I’m walking through the door without even the gesture of a glance. When the first butterfly appears, hanging upside down from the mailbox with a windblown spin, then I stoop to look. It isn’t yet strong enough to fly and now I see, there are several other orange, black, and white winged butterflies fixed to the walls around the threshold.

A few days had passed--how many, I can’t be sure. But so much happened in the weeks when I was elsewhere. The earth spun and I hadn't registered it except by the changing light and rhythms of eating, sleeping and working. How can we expand our care beyond what we can see? Every attempt to see more clearly our position in an interconnected, ever-decaying / ever-doubling world could be colored by an admission that our senses carry us along, whim after codified whim.

//

If language can be an entry into art, it is because it re-presents, indexes something we can conceptualize, whether real or fantasy, preexisting or yet to come. Potentia // Actualitas, a two person show at Throughline finds Cindee Travis Klement and JR Roykovich responding to a call that extends from Aristotle to our present moment and into an imagined future. The duo take their title from a binary philosophical framework to describe the nature of what’s possible and what is happening. Both sides of this formulation seem to carry the weight of their significance, and might benefit from unpacking, but I am forever obsessed with the work of the //. The slash as divider but also an obvious bridge between what comes before and what comes after. Slashes, dividers, walls, borders and containers are always permeable. Whether it is an expectant look or the breath before a vowel carries a thought from you to me, a diacritic pause to sustain life, something passes between. And this passing through, this hitch is a conduit between what is here and what could be.

The walk to Throughline takes me under a bridge where people live, where on different days the police pester them or city workers in trucks marked COVID Clean Up come to sweep the sidewalks. The METROrail cuts through with a metallic warble, a warning to look left and right. It’s warm on this day and will be warmer next month. I’m connected to the people here by Blackness, by proximity, by despair, by existence, by hope. The lines of connection are clearer when I walk, as each step takes seconds that add up to minutes of sharing the space together. I’ve driven this exact same stretch several times a week, and even though I make sure to make eye contact and nod, my car is a weapon and my music is a shield. But from what or to whom?

There are other worlds they have not told you of that wish to speak to you.[1]

There are other worlds that live nowhere and in everyone. It is hard to think of another world in the future where all of our possible selves can exist without threat of direct attack or institutional neglect. I say it is hard to think but it is easy to feel.

Covered with diachromatic film, the gallery windows throw light and color into an opalescent soupy street scene: a mirror image of myself, the LightRail whizzing behind me in a blur of magenta.

Upon entering, to the right, there is a row of framed documents from the declassified Project Blue Book, accounts of unidentified objects. The facsimiles are hung at waist level, imposed on a large image of blue sky, dotted with white orbs. Above, from a twirling disco ball hangs an iridescent acrylic rectangle. JRR employs extensive research and the power of found materials to point toward layers of worlds. On the rectangle with its blue, green, fuschia, peach swirl of colors, a butterfly is wrapped around the edge. You can find a reflection of a wing at the same time you can peer through to the other side and see the back of the opposite wing.

Ahead, projectors, each with a different view of waterlife, steep the gallery in a flickering green glow. A serpentine shape of cinder blocks, dollars, seashells, circuit boards, branches, petrified wood, and rusted metals lies on the floor. Neon pink nylon string bounces from top to bottom like a ray. I can see the nylon lines tied off to the branches or the cinder blocks below and eyelets up above, but in some moments, my mind allows them to extend through the ceiling to points unseen and unknown. There are butterflies, resting on nearly every tensioned string. Klement, in her work with ecologies and attention to regenerative agriculture, has documented hours of life in and around her urban ponds which are now projected at dynamic angles and displayed on small LCD screens along the winding assemblage of plant matter, industrial debris and connecting C-clamps. Sometimes a waterline is a horizon. Sometimes a line is a thing drawn tight, while other times a line finds its way by searching.

In talking with Cindee, she relays how much she’s thinking about systems; those which happen inside and around us, arising from the planet and those which are human made. She wonders what it would look like for our systems of building, of producing and consuming to change. Rusted metals and petrified wood resemble each other. And the seashells vaguely resemble the crumpled dollar bills. Placed next to each other, my mind makes a leap to how shells have a history as currency, and how new systems of value arise if we think about the abstraction of natural resources like fossil fuels to currency. When JR and I spoke, we talked about the verdant nature of speech: the constraining nature of sentences in contrast to the lexical web from which we conjure an utterance. How many paths a sentence can take. How this exemplifies a world of unboundedness just beyond the surface. How, as he puts it “both queerness and the paranormal make space for themselves”. Shadows cast by glass and colored acrylic feel like spiritual happenings, like pools of light nestled between a neck and shoulder. Circuit boards look like cities: information highways, office buildings, streets, ponds, water towers, trees, homes. Together, Cindee and JR ask us to look closer, attend to what the senses allow but also recognize where the edge of our senses brush up against the unknowable. Like a hue that pulls you from across the room, and when you get there, you have a tickling sensation that you could see more if only your eyes were properly attuned. There’s hope that some message might come through from the other side. And it almost does.

//

After the summer my parents took us to Disney World, I imagined the world would be better because everything could be shiny and pristine. We rode the monorail with big bright smiles, braced against the bullet speed. Being from Houston, the elevated train was such a novelty, I was sure the world of the Jetsons and Star Trek wasn’t too far away. Of all the demos, at The Epcot Center in 1999, from cleaning robots to solar panels, what struck my family, was the speech-to- text software. To put it simply, we were amazed. A man in a polo and khakis, or was it a short sleeve button up, or was it jeans, demonstrated how you could speak into the headset and produce words typed onto a pixelated screen, blinking cursor and all. We rode the rides and ate the food, played in VR suits, waited in lines, exhausted ourselves with sun, simulacra, and sucrose.

A few years later we saw some version of the software at the electronics store, Circuit City and my dad bought it for us. It was clunky. It was only able to transcribe something like 30% of what it “heard”. Quite often, a sentence was missing many words. Things just dropped out and picked up on the other side, like a skip in a record. Saying “backspace” or “delete” out loud was tedious and silly. The trouble the software had with capturing speech reflects a muddiness we have with making signs from senses, thoughts and feelings. There is loss. There are so many gaps -- in knowledge, in morals, in empathy.

In Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects, about the human mind grappling with something as vastly dispersed and pernicious as eco-disaster, they write, “meshes are potent metaphors for the strange interconnectedness of things, an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences”[2]. In the gallery space I am a child who observes and doesn’t necessarily understand. Here I can look, and think and make connections, or fail to make connections, and that is more than ok. In fact if I “got it”-- all of the time, I would no longer be wondering.

I read the space as a whole and then try to give attention to its individual parts before becoming overwhelmed and moving onto another part of the exhibition. As in nature, I am rewarded for changing my position. Uprightness is only so useful. Stooping and crouching bring new worlds into focus. Craning my neck reveals even more connections. The forest of pink nylon mimics the underwater view of aquatic vegetation. Fish and birds and butterflies have a relationship here, a kinship made apparent by seeing them surf. What is the difference between reaching up to pluck a leaf and squatting to peer into a puddle or leaning into a flower’s face? The difference between reaching up to pluck a ray of nylon and stooping to see an LCD screen with videos of plants breathing water or breathing air?

//

There are two large photographic prints of light aberrations hung across from each other. One is black, blue and blurry, with the depth of a night horizon. One is black and red, hinting at force beyond comprehension. Michael Taussig says “to sail through color is to become embodied”[3]. To be embodied is to surrender to the sensorial. A mirrored tile, from a disco ball, is placed carefully beneath a corner of the intimate photo of a man in bed, with light raking across the sheets, fingers, cheek and chin.

The fog enters the gallery like an aura, moving across the floor and sweeping up into the room, suspending parts of the projected videos in mid air. What is the difference between what hangs in the air and what hangs in the balance?

I know exactly where the fog came from because the machine is visible, no attempt at sleight of hand. As with the C-clamps, media players, SD cards and power cords, resisting artifice makes room for adult sized wonder. Even though I see all of the infrastructure, I am no less moved. I can’t help but peer into the fog, with some concerted effort to divine another realm. This exhibition seems to welcome me, saying “bring your cynicism and doubt. There is room for that too, but look, there is still magic”.

There are other worlds they have not told you of that wish to speak to you.

In some ways this show is an intercessor, going between us in the now and a future of collaborative world building, but it’s also a medium who brings us in contact with the uncanny and the sublime. I’ve begun to think of the work done here by Cindee and JRR as a kind of ecotone, a necessary space of transition. If I go outside, and take these patterns of movement with me, the stooping, the craning, the focused attention, the openness, I might see other worlds. If I look I might see things I can’t explain. Light hanging oddly in the sky. Openings into alternate possibilities. Places where we can shift our habits and spheres of care. I might see genocide and unrest. Protest and suppression. I might see a bloom of hope or someone moving with just enough energy to get across the street before the train comes.

________________

[1] There Are Other Worlds(They Have Not Told You Of) - Sun Ra

[2] Hyperobjects:Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World pp. 84

[3] What Color Is the Sacred? pp.101

Project 3:

In/Between | A Rock and a Hard Place:
Visions from the Ghost World of how to Survive One’s Sovereignty of Self Destruction in a Land We Assumed We Once Knew.
Rice Media Center, Rice University, Houston, Texas
2019

On Being In/Between

JR Roykovich describes the past five years of his life as nomadic. This is a common reality for artists piecing together residencies and teaching jobs as they try to find a homebase while embracing the freedom of not being tied to one. Roykovich has worked in New York, Washington, DC, Minneapolis, and most recently Galveston, Texas. The Galveston Artist Residency gave Roykovich a studio, and for a year he found grounding. I use the word grounding intentionally because his culminating exhibition at the residency largely consisted of objects unearthed from a nearby construction site. Currently Roykovich teaches at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and he is reflecting on his travels through the state of Texas and his time in “The West” -- a historically mythic, grandiose place.

Roykovich’s installation at Rice University’s Media Center presents his impressions, recollections, and readings of the Texas landscape through photography, drawing, found objects and text. It is a compilation of places assembled into a psychic map that volleys between the specific and the abstract. An enlarged photograph tiled on a wall legibly captures a rock surface, but viewed up close it could look like a fuzzy broken image, digital glitch or interference. Roykovich’s drawings, done in the studio removed from the landscape, look like geological strata quilted together, sliding down the page, aerial views of land meeting water, or hypnotic mark making.

Many of us in a nomadic state may simply fixate on our destination as we travel from point A to point B, but Roykovich gravitates to the in between places. He uses this phrase, the “In/Between” in his exhibition’s title, and he writes about how the term defines his relationship to reality as “part removed, part immersed and always existing in a space of my own.” I write this essay in my own “in between” state. A former resident of Houston now living in the greater Boston, Massachusetts area, I rely on email exchanges, written descriptions, digital images, and sketches to understand an installation Roykovich is in the midst of preparing to compose largely onsite in the Rice University Media Center gallery space. I can sometimes imagine myself in or navigating his installation, but I can never actually see it or experience it. I only mention this fact because this predicament feels fitting for writing about an artist who wants to place us inside of his experience of the Texas landscape, an experience that may at once feel familiar to people who have spent time in Texas, but at the same time made strange through Roykovich’s distorted lens.

Instead of simply passing through, Roykovich takes the time to look, listen, and record his observations of these in between places, many of them non-descript or seemingly empty. He uses an electronic device called an Ovilus 5 that ghost hunters and others who wish to communicate with spirits use to generate long strings of text that the device spits out as it purportedly picks up the voices of the dead. The Ovilus 5’s readings become found poems that Roykovich mixes with his own words that relate to research he has done about a particular place or his immediate observations. In Roykovich’s hands, the Ovilus is not a literal tool or transmitter, but a metaphorical device. It is a symbolic instrument that shows the seemingly empty as something full of invisible energies and the superficially non-descript rich with hidden stories, often involving murder and trauma. He has traveled through Galveston, a place often described as haunted, as well as “The Texas Killing Fields,” a stretch of the I-45 corridor between Houston and Galveston where since the 1970s the bodies of 30 unsolved murder victims have been found. He does not assert that he has necessarily captured the voices of the dead, but that instead he has found a “a way to let that environment, which otherwise could not be accessed, have a phonetic voice.” He continues to explain:

“I am curious as to what the land has to say, as particles and atoms and molecules that have been around since The Big Bang. What can it tell us about where we are now? What if we had listening parties on lands that are scared from trauma, or have held sacred rituals - what would the land tell us? … What we perceive as the banal and ordinary landscape of our daily lives is actually teeming with morsels of discovery like grubs emerging from the dirt.”

But unlike a traditional landscape painter setting up their easel to capture a sublime piece of Western landscape before their eyes, Roykovich gives equal weight to the seen and unseen elements he finds in a place, holding them in a vibrating state of tension. An example of this is a 44” x 20 photograph snaking through the gallery space. Reading it from left to right, the image unfolds out before us to show a mountain ridge’s silhouette interrupted with intense bands of bright red and yellow. The bands of color look like solar flares where the camera becomes flooded with light, overwhelmed by the brightness of the sun and yielding to an unseen intensity and force.

Part of Roykovich’s intentions is to forge a deeper connection to places we may take for granted and that are rapidly changing because of climate and social change. He wishes to draw our attention not simply to the grandeur of a vista -- an impulse that could easily slide into a nature worshipping cliche -- but instead to the buzzing magnitude and mystery of basic reality. Influenced by theoretical physicists writing about the nature of reality and origin of the universe, he describes the neon strings he often uses in his installations as “materializing the hidden latticework that keeps our reality upright from collapsing.” The strings could be fiber optic cables, rays of light, a photon’s path of travel, and a very literal nod to string theory. It may sound exhausting to imagine every slice of reality as teeming with possibility, but it is much better than the alternative. Roykovich’s desire to observe and listen to the places that may not be culturally demarcated with historical plaques or set aside as important, is a cure for the malaise that could set in when you may feel stuck in the middle of nowhere. It is a reminder that we are always somewhere that has a story to tell, but how we access that story is the creative act.

Joshua Fischer
Independent Writer and Curator at Large
Formally of the Rice Gallery (1995 - 2017)
Boston, MA
2019

Project 4:

Systematic Magic
Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, Texas
2019