Robert Conger
ARTIST
The Collections.
Conger has focused on chance, physical strength and corporate dollars to talk about power. In various collections over the past few year, he zeroes in on the originators of modern convenience by including a group of over a dozen inventors and intellectuals such as Alan Greenspan who have shaped our current way of life, such as Dr. Adler, inventor of the remote control, Mike Lazardidrids, inventor of the BlackBerry and Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet. He puts their portraits next to the portraits of media personalities like Tim Russert and Tyra Banks, recognizable and powerful arbiters of news, who serve as bridges between business and the general public..
CEO'S. You Ought'a Be in Pictures
Artists have become skilled at recontextualizing. When appropriation failed, artists plundered science, technology, film, sociology, and politics. The push, I suspect, has self-preservation and self-loathing at its dualistic core. For preservation, artists, slightly disenfranchised, should plunder finance, economics—paintings about building their wealth, not their transgressional identities. To avoid the fear of disapproval, of fringehood, artists should jump the fence and look at other art. That's what I've tried to do: craft, gimmick, origami, digital art, design, toys. The legacy of minimalism should be pop-up books."- Rob Conger.
Lottery. Desires
Rob Conger whose art–latch-hook rugs like the ones he made as a youth–focuses frequently on the mediated dreams of money: he’s done yarn homages to lottery lines, lottery tickets, (“We confuse our desire for beauty with our desire for money,” he writes.)
Reality. Mediated dreams of money
“A viewer can take away whether you think it’s praise or a satire, when it’s probably both,” he said. “There’s such a philanthropic person that there’s an American folk art portrait of them.”
Disneyland Deaths. “happiest place on Earth"
At various sites of the relatively few times people have died accidentally on a ride or attraction at the “happiest place on Earth.”Working from photographic source material, he develops a detailed pattern in Photoshop before embarking on the simple, though time-consuming, process of hooking the yarn through canvas mesh. His process and materials are a way for him to reconcile “barriers between finance and crafts, business and homemaking,” he says. In the book By Hand, Conger also observes that “I am fascinated and fulfilled by the idea that I can use craft to surprise people into seeing through their shields.”
Pop Up Book. BLOW YOUR WAD
From Mixed Greens Gallery:
To provide greater context, Conger also includes his self-made pop-up book, “Blow Your Wad,” which details the almost certain futility of tying to get rich quick. If you follow the sound of a ticker tape, you will find Conger’s stop motion animation at the back of the gallery, dramatizing the ups and downs of Wall Street. Both use other traditional craft media in order to explore the interplay between money and the human condition.