Ray

Ogar

Ray Ogar's work invites viewers to reflect upon the ways in which we discern and validate knowledge. Skillfully combining images from an array of scientific and educational materials using both analog and digital collage methods, Ogar has created a significant body of work. His collages probe the depths of ontological inquiry and the inherent power structures within archival systems, striking an equilibrium between the earnest and playful.

Collage is a collision of the dry and the absurd, the beautiful and the ugly, the fantasy and the fact. Its form affords the discovery of new terrains, the creation of subversive counterfactual texts, poetry by way of redacted sentences, all of which reveals new knowledge, even if merely a window into the personal psyche. If an image is made up of other images, is it new, or merely a re-purposed data set?

Ray Ogar

Ray Ogar’s work is inherently formal and aesthetic. However, additional levels of meaning ask, "how do we evaluate or verify relevant knowledge or facts?" This is done through the medium of analog and digital collage by way of sourcing imagery primarily from scientific textbooks, instruction manuals, and tangential didactic sources.

Thus knowledge/systems, thing-ness/ontology, and power structures by way of archives are peripherally interrogated. The work itself is seemingly serious, occasionally playful, and always strives for satire or coded culture critique transformed into fake textbooks, false knowledge tracts, and re-purposed factsheets. A final question: what happens when the collage with mixed source material survives to the future and not the original fact or knowledge base it is derived from?

Courtesy of Ray Ogar

Ray Ogar was born in 1973 in Illinois, USA. He is currently based in Arkansas, USA.

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