Jacob Rochester Muses on Music as a Memory Device in 'Input/Output'
At Plato Gallery, the Los Angeles-based artist makes a New York solo debut.
Summary
- Jacob Rochester heads to Plato Gallery in New York to open Input/Ouput, his latest solo exhibition
- Featuring a suite of new and recent oil paintings, the showcase explores music as a unifier, bridging generations and genres, eras and places
Press play on your favorite song and, only a matter of measures in, you’re already somewhere else — a different time or place, maybe surrounded by a sea of familiar faces. Music, and its immense, connective power, is a central for Jacob Rochester, an artist who translates the warmth and intimacy of sound into a rich, canvas-based language.
The Los Angeles-based artist goes bicoastal with Input/Output, his New York solo debut. Now on view at Plato through March 7, the show brings together a family of new and recent works that trace familial ties, everyday rituals and the subtle codes through which nostalgia is nurtured.
Likened by Rochester as a deeply personal “conversation between the past and the present,” this suite draws heavily from his father’s life as a reggae drummer in the late 1980s — tightly cropped hands adjusting stereo dials, fingers poised mid-song, old Polaroids of bandmates — sat beside more recent scenes from the artist’s own life, with his partner and loved ones in LA. Jamaican reggae culture, 1990s hip-hop aesthetics flirt with the textures of the contemporary everyday.
Technically, the work is built through accumulation, moving between sketching, gouache, digital manipulation and oil painting, Rochester employs a glazing process akin to Titian, when translucent veils of color are laid atop monochrome underpainting, making for compositions that imbues the bravado of Renaissance drapery with a cozy, domestic calm.
“The past will always inform my work in some way or another, whether it’s conceptually or through technique,” he continued. “The challenge of navigating that in a way that still feels contemporary is something I’ve always been drawn to.”
Much like music, Rochester’s work has a way of folding memory, time and experience in on themselves, making for a nostalgia, in-flux and alive in speakers, clothing and the spaces and moments shared between one another.
Head to Plato to experience Input/Output for yourself.
Plato Gallery
202 Bowery,
New York, NY 10012
