Alex Cascone at Roogla

Roogla coffee shop is proud to present local NYC-born artist Alex Cascone in his first solo show.

The work presents a fantastical urban sensibility, at times dissolving into abstraction, and always in motion.

The centerpiece of the show is The Windmills of Perception. The Windmills of Perception is made of steel and looks over the entire room, standing at about ten feet tall. Three red “windmills” spin majestically on the black pedestal and curved supports. The vertical alignment of it’s components combined with it’s horizontal curves and motion create a hypnotizing spectacle.  A light fixed to the pedestal projects a second image ten feet higher onto the high wall behind the sculpture. The shadows of the spinning pieces are now seen from a different perspective. As the sun becomes lower in the sky, the shadows become more and more apparent and ominous.

The complementary steel sculpture, Keep it Balanced, is 3.5 feet tall and features two pieces of steel cut to look like forks, then bent so that one balances atop another on a tine. This sculpture both balances and spins at the same time.

When visiting the show, one’s attention is immediately drawn to The Windmills of Perception. However, it is no less rewarding to spend some time with and absorb the photography and digital graphic canvases and aluminum prints. The photography presents a gritty yet cosmopolitan urban reality as it is, a well-framed slice of life in a world where we are surrounded by metal and stone. The graphic based images maintain this cosmopolitan grittiness, but also add a touch more color and life – the color our imaginations fill in when we find ourselves lacking. Particularly striking is the set of three Greek God in Fountain photographs. Photography combined with a careful touch of graphics present characters which are not quite sculpted, not quite real. Shot at an often-overlooked park in Grand Army Plaza, the photographs remind us that sometimes there is life and humanity in the places where we would least expect them to be.