Rob Roy: Dispatches

Founders Gallery
248 Cabot Street
Beverly, MA 01915
Gallery Hours
Open to Montserrat community M-F, 10am-5pm or
By Appointment: [email protected]
Dates
September 27, 2021–January 14, 2022

Founders Gallery is pleased to present a recent and ongoing series of monotypes by Rob Roy, Professor of Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking at Montserrat College of Art.

Roy prints on preprinted graphics, such as commercially produced brochures, postcards, art magazines, and catalogs, layering his distinctive and bold graphics and vibrant color over the existing substrate. Through this process, Roy does not so much as transform the found image than purposefully obfuscate it, selectively incorporating areas of the original image only as it serves in the creation of the new work.

While Roy’s prints display enticing materiality, his subject matter is deceptively straightforward. Recurrent images and themes, such as silhouettes of helicopters, planes, and automobiles are—a visual vocabulary that the artist refers to as an “open system”—symbolically allude to a range of current and historic events (such as ongoing wars, terrorism, and global conflicts) and aspects of consumer culture. Also on view are selections from Roy’s “Bestiary” series of animal figures, printed in a similar style that convey ideas of nature versus culture.