""Water is important to people who do not have it," Joan Didion wrote, "and the same is true of control." She was talking about California, and the impressive machinery-"the aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains"-that has, since the early 20th Century, made American life as we know it to be plausible in the West."
"Taken from her 1977 essay, "Holy Water," Coughing in the pipes is how Didion describes the sounds of a well that has gone dry. In the world of Rogers' paintings, the phrase evokes alarm sounding beneath the image, a sense that something is going terribly wrong. Even before we see the title of Flood, what appears to be an overflowing sink also conveys, in the paisley of light swirling across a black pool, a greater landscape of disaster."
Luke Rogers' paintings focus on the plumbing and water-control systems that sustain California, from dams in Oroville and Antelope Valley to the Jawbone siphon, the Los Angeles aqueduct, and the sink in his studio. The works place domestic plumbing alongside large-scale infrastructure, treating pipes and pumps as contiguous elements of the same system. Visual cues such as overflowing sinks and dark pools evoke alarm and the sense of ecological failure without explicit didacticism. The paintings register droughts, wildfires, and earthquakes as ordinary conditions, offering essayistic, truthful scenes rooted in the artist's attention to painted materials, perception, and hand.
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