"Airyka Rockefeller: Critic's Choice" Saatchi Online
By Constance Gounod August 10th 2009

Sumptuary monuments used to have this strange purpose in the world where they were built by men for men, sometimes to protect, others to defend, often to impress or intimidate each other. For Bataille, these along with luxury, mourning, war, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity, are all part of what he calls "nonproductive expenditure, activities which, at least in primitive circumstances have no end beyond themselves" and yet, which have a non-distinct though definite role in the well being of society.

Airyka Rockefeller's photographs explore a similar paradigm between the symbolic and factual value of found objects, articulating the unassuming poetic beauty of life's little ironies. Her series ‘9 Skins', looks at the shape that garments take once they fall off our bodies as if embarking on a second life once relieved from their occupier, and 'Crooked Meadow' documents neglected corners of a little town in the Czech Republic, telling both of their long gone prime and poetic potential.

In her series of collages 'Castles, Copies & Caves', she turns her attention to architecture, exploring the encounter of monuments with their own reproduced image. These massive structures of defense and habitation, which now parcel the old continent with little function other than to delight the busloads of tourist waves, have managed to survive centuries of wars, bankruptcies, totalitarian regimes and public neglect. Yet these 'time capsules', as Rockefeller calls them, carry an increasingly mythical self-fictionalization, brought by the commodification of their image. "We relegate old stones to the sidelines as rubble, or else elevate them as architectures, aiming to convince ourselves there are still places available to our fantasies, even as time moves differently." Borrowed from tourist brochures, old postcards, online shops, video games and children books, these collages of found castles mimic fantastical reflections of each other, as if intrinsically connected by the irony brought by their lack of purpose and glorified existence.

Airyka Rockefeller (b1979) was raised on a small forested island in the Puget Sound, a complex of inland marine waterways in the northwestern part of Washington State (USA). She moved to New York in 1997 to pursue studies in photography, writing and phenomenological anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College and has since done residencies in India (2001), Czech Republic (2006), and Seattle (2007) at the "Photographic Center Northwest". She now lives in San Francisco where she works as a writer, dancer, cook and photographer.

The Castle That Started It All is currently on view as part of group show called "WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon", at the Laguna Art Museum, CA.

1. Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure", Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, US, 1985)

Untitled Diptych #5 from The Castle That Started It All series, lightjet c-print, 5" x 5", 2008