JR Roykovich Perhaps Just a Trick of the Light

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 philosophical symbols 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. 

In addition to the installation, JRR will collaborate with performance artist Jeanette “Joy” Harris on September 12th and 13th 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 Centreville, Texas, where a civilian reported an encounter with something unknown that appeared to them in “a flash of light and a loud roar.”

JR Roykovich (JRR) is a conceptual & research-based artist who broadly investigates the spaces created by the intersections of Mystery, Queerness, and The Sublime. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, these inquiries often stem from geographical sites as an impetus to document how the psychic history residing there can affect our contemporary experience. These explorations result in an environmental recollection, whereby to create immersive installations and mappings containing arrangements of found and made objects, drawings, and lens-based works based off that data. JRR’s work serves as a nerve center to intuit the spatial exchanges happening at these locations, documenting the geo-spectral networks embedded within while creating new phenomenological mythologies.

JRR holds an MFA in Visual Art from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and a BFA in Art and Visual Technology from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. JRR has shown across the United States, internationally, and has further been an artist in residence at the Galveston Artist Residency, The Solar Studios at Rice University, The Woodstock Brydcliffe Guild, The Chautauqua Institution, Alexandria, Virginia’s Torpedo Factory Art Center, among others. JRR has work in various public and private collections and has worked In/Between New York, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and now Houston.

Detail of Wonky Circles by Tamirah Collins. Headshot courtesy of the artist.