For the Mills Gallery’s Project Room, Robert Rovenolt has created work that transforms the cast-off and forgotten into powerful explorations that address personal identity and one’s fragile relationship with humanity and the natural world.

In his words, “This body of work is memory as collage. One’s mind sifts through layers of experiences and emotions trying to make sense of them but of course there are gaps, distortions and unexpected juxtapositions. Just as AI is capable of hallucinations, so too is the human brain: concocting fantastic dreams as well as focusing on perceived reality.

From my earliest works I’ve been fascinated with exaggerated shifts in scale, ambiguous narratives, and tactile additions. I’ve learned to live with and celebrate the unknowns in a work as I assemble it. For me, it’s about the discovery that happens through chance guided by years of experience when you change the context and history of an object.”

Rovenolt was born in Pennsylvania in 1949. He moved to Boston’s South End in 1974. The artist has maintained a studio at the Boston Center for the Arts during that half-century.

Robert Rovenolt, BCA Studio Resident

The use of found objects has been the core tenet of my studio practice for nearly fifty years. My constructions, collage, assemblages and sculpture all incorporate castoffs and detritus. I usually don’t actively look for these discards, but rather “let them find me”. Sometimes this process is accelerated by “finds” that “picker friends” save for me.

When incorporating found objects, one is never completely the master of one’s fate. It becomes a collaboration with chance, and the material itself is the source of inspiration. Within the premise that art is as much “visceral as visual”, I feel the use of discarded objects adds much to the equation. One’s response to an object in a new context, elicits in the viewer, a sense of layered richness and mystery.

“The sole purpose of the arts is neither description nor imitation, but the creation from elements which are always present but not apparent.”  —Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1911.

Opening reception supported in part by Culture Pop.