A Flash of Light and a Loud Roar A collaborative performance

JR Roykovich will collaborate with Margaux Crump, Jake Eshelman, and Jeanette “Joy” Harris on September 13th at 4 PM to create a new ephemeral piece titled “A Flash of Light and a Loud Roar,” which explores research on how inflicted trauma often opens up a pathway for individuals to have perceived paranormal experiences; the title for this piece comes from a 1957 Project Blue Book report from Harris’ hometown of Centerville, Texas, the location of Harris’ family home and where a civilian reported an encounter with something unknown that appeared to them in “a flash of light and a loud roar.”

Drove all night
                    thinking I’d find something 
                                                                we lost
I thought I heard
               the fear in the boy
               or the fire in the man
Perhaps just a trick of the light
                           to try and understand
                                                                     the wonder in your eyes.

Lawndale Art & Performance Center will present Perhaps Just a Trick of the Light by 2024/2025 Artist Studio Program participant JR Roykovich (JRR) in the John M. O’Quinn gallery.

Perhaps Just a Trick of the Light is a multimedia installation that continues the artist’s modes of using light, lens-based media, and found objects to build immersive environments that explore geographic and metaphoric space, perception, and experience. 

JRR’s work is project-based and site-specific, utilizing an intuitive and reactive methodology to create visual narratives by incorporating varying disparate elements into one larger whole. For Perhaps Just a Trick of the Light, JRR adopts the semiotics of queer nightlife, the reflections of personal pilgrimages, and purposeful utilization of trite motifs around paranormal phenomena, both local and wide-reaching, while using Lawndale’s John M. O’Quinn gallery as a mothership of investigation.

Image: Detail of Wonky Circles by JR Roykovich, image courtesy of the artist.