For his latest installment of the long-running Grey Invaders series, John Colle Rogers transformed Blankspace Gallery into a war zone. In this room-sized diorama, titled Crazy Train to the Land of Pure Imagination, the Grey Invaders battle the Green Defenders on a post-modern battlefield writ large in model-railroad scale. Armed with caches of simulacra and fueled by thematic revulsion, the combatants in Rogers’ phantasmagorical campaign are icons stolen with equal abandon from pop culture and military history.

The Defenders (comprised of U.S. Marines, Civil War cavalry, knights in armor and a few ghosts thrown in for good measure) wage a war for internal order against the Invaders (Celtic and Zulu warriors, World War II German soldiers and radioactive cows). Though each motley team is united by uniform color, there are defectors. The Native American troops swing both ways and adding to the confusion, rogue skate zombies, whose glow-in-the-dark bodies defy both reason and gravity, ollie through the slippage like Ronin- master less and unallied.

Set on a plain of brown desert sand, the battlefield hosts the multiple fronts of what Rogers describes as the “war to end all wars.” A model train, serving as the theater’s central nervous system, runs circles around the periphery, skirting sidetracks to nowhere that peter out into sandy wastelands and dead-end into walls. It shoots through Devil’s Tower that looms above the fray like a panoptic command central. The tower, referencing both the Wyoming geological formation sacred to Native Americans as well as Spielberg’s mashed potato/UFO version of it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, exemplifies the contested sites over which the Grey Invaders and the Green Defenders fight. Top it with a replica of 17th century Osaka Castle hammered from sheet metal using ancient armor-making techniques, and you get a sense of the kinds of battles going on in this fracas between sign and meaning.

Everywhere, touches of day glow detail, activated by backlight cast from a flying-V spaceship-guitar mounted on the ceiling, reveal that nothing is as it seems: the cows fornicating in a bucolic field have only three legs; horsemen ride backward into battle; steamships fortified with missiles serve as amphibious landing vehicles and headless skaters navigate the walls of graffiti-tagged grain silos. The warring soundtrack that pervades the space (a generic heavy metal dirge pitted against a trip-hop version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Pure Imagination themesong) slays any dichotomous urges you may still have. As commander-in-chief of this miniature world, Rogers reveals himself to be a master strategist, pitting sign and meaning against one another in what might be called the Milieu Massacre.

Not only does Crazy Train represent the hundreds of eye-straining hours Rogers has poured into its excruciating detail, it showcases the artist’s biography- one shaped by the twin influences of art and war. His father, Colonel John H. Rogers, also a sculptor, headed the Marine combat art program during Vietnam. Much like today’s embedded reporters, combat artists were deployed to document the theater of war from the front lines. Though his documents are drawn from the battle lines of a satirical front of his own devising Rogers is, like his father, a combat artist. The liberal amounts of absurdist humor he deploys possibly belie the earnestness of his visual badinage, but Rogers’ puns are all intentional and the result is serious fun.

blankspace gallery
June 29-August 6, 2007

Opening reception: Saturday, June 30th 6-9pm

6608 San Pablo Avenue
Oakland 510-547-6608
www.blankspacegallery.com
Hours: Friday 4-8pm; Saturday-Monday 12-5pm and by appointment