JR Roykovich

It’s been six months since “Potentia//Actualitas,” and it’s just now getting on my feed. The wonderful and I worked collaboratively to put together ’s first two-artist show. It was the start of many good things, both for the two of us and for Throughline. All photos here by .eshelman

From the press release: “Potentia // Actualitas is a collaborative, immersive installation that explores the potential and actualized complexities of natural intelligence through lens-based media, found objects and ready-mades, in a site-specific installation. The lens-based works record iterations of light, space and water surrounding a central structure created from organic matter, rusted artifacts, glass, and construction materials. Running throughout is a neon line that connects these varying attributes into a systematic relationship. Together, Klement and Roykovich build a world that investigates the balance of opposing dichotomies and subsequent freedom from dualistic constraints. They advocate for a wild and intuitive response to a possible future of unbound potential.”

Aokigahara, from November 2022. This roll obviously got fogged somehow, and while there’s most likely an earthly explanation, I’m choosing to believe that a disrupted roll of film taken in a haunted forest can only have one culprit: 👻

I’m usually really careful with my film, as it’s an expensive practice - each time I fly, it’s hand-checked both ways (often times much to the ire of the TSA/security staff). So I’m not sure what happened. It could be that the roll was just old, or it got subjected to heat; interesting that it picked up the patterns and numbers from the paper backing of the roll. I’m not a precious photographer, and part of the reason I love film is because there’s always an element of surprise between the time you load the film to when you see the final negative after development. Film photography is always a tug of war of control between yourself and the medium.

I’ve written about Aokigahara before here on Instagram, but it remains a serene site. I personally don’t get the heebie-jeebies while I’m there, but I can understand the folklore: the volcanic stone that the forest grows out of is porous and absorbs sound, so it makes the landscape noticeably quiet. Each time I’m there, I try to make it a little further back into the forest, a little further immersed into the quiet sea of trees.

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As I install a new show, I’m thinking back to these artifacts that I collected during the year I lived on Galveston Island. Galveston is a place like no other, being a barrier island in the Texan Gulf, with a cyclical legacy of destruction and endurance. Because of how many times the ocean has tried to reclaim the land, material remnants of Galveston’s architectural and infrastructure history are quite literally surface deep, even going back to the time of pirates and the native Karankawa; you only have to go a few inches below the dirt before you start pulling up artifacts of the island’s history: pipes, railroad spikes, horseshoes, porcelain, tile - I even found an old ceramic container for “tooth powder” (a precursor to toothpaste), that through some light research, I dated to around 1915. I think often about the things we’ll leave behind, and how, a couple hundred years from now (if humans are still around) some random soul will dig a hole to find a random object we’ve discarded or forgotten. Or, on a grander scale, in a future perhaps unfathomable to our sense of time, how some non-human intelligence may find our golden record stowed away on the Voyager spacecrafts. (Granted, that placement is intentional and curated.) But are we our artifacts? In our current digital age, when much of what we do is now ephemeral, will our physical left-behinds tell an accurate story of who we were? Perhaps it will, maybe even more so than we like to admit.

Travel in Light Years:
Artifacts & devices adapted to
traverse the precarious spectrum
In/Between
Homofuturism and the superannuated
as an exile in a land
of glorious f/utility.

Galveston Artist Residency Gallery
Galveston, Texas
August - November, 2022.

Whenever I do a project, being that I usually work site specifically, I like to spend a lot of time in and around the location where I’m going to build an installation, immersing myself in the surrounding area. With that, I’ve been really fortunate over the past few years to spend a lot of time in Galveston; it’s a place that has found a place in my heart due to the welcoming nature of the art community there, along with the island’s quirkiness and history of trauma + uncanny occurrences. Part of the way I like to research my sites is by using a lens, documenting my explorations, recording what I come across. I have a whole series that I haven’t really shown at all of 35mm and 120mm film images that I’ve taken on the island over the past several years.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to appreciate simplicity. Shooting black and white film is always a way for me to slow down and really look at what I’m seeing. This is obviously not new - photographers have been utilizing this exact strategy since the medium’s inception. But through doing these small environmental studies, I find that I can really investigate my physical surroundings. So much can be said about the nature of Galveston Island by just looking at the layering and repairing of one brick wall.

There’s just something about a good disco ball.

For “Travel in Light Years”, the disco ball had many purposes for me, first and foremost being a signifier of q***r dance spaces. I came of age (and came out) right at the end of the New York club scene, and it was instrumental in helping me shape a new identity as a young q***r person - a different one than the one that had been striped away by years of toxic, evangelical Christianity. Q***r clubs were the first place I felt safe, felt seen and felt free to be myself.

The disco ball also is a stand in for celestial bodies. It reflects light, like much in the cosmos; it orbits - it’s a silvery sun, sending out its rays to encourage life.

Light is always a big component of my work, both for the ways it carries information, and in the case of photography, for the way it records it. Elsewhere in this show, I had blown up images of 3200 film negatives, enlarged so that the grain of the film was prominent, causing the images to become windows into other universes. The disco ball further casts off those pinpoints of light, adding to the linear traveling of rays into those other realms.

Plus, they’re just really fun.

Visitation/documentation date Saturday, January 23, 2021, 10:32 EST; original sighting dates: Monday, July 26, 1948, at approximately 21:00 EST. (And Saturday, July 24, 1948 in Montgomery, Alabama.) The sky was mostly clear on the day of visitation, with some light clouds. No observed phenomena on day of visitation.

This case begins rather benignly, but then takes some interesting twists and turns. On the evening of Monday, July 26, 1948, an officer on duty (“Avery”, in a mistakenly non-redacted portion of the report) in the observation tower at the Atlanta Naval Air Station in Chamblee, Georgia (now Peachtree-Dekalb Airport) reported seeing a blue-white streaking light in the sky, at a low altitude, on a straight, steady course. Overall, there were multiple reports across various locations, prompting the Project Sign (the precursor to Blue Book) investigator to initially declare the sighting a meteor. It is curious to note, however, that the reported object seemed to “gain altitude” instead of descending, as it would be expected with a meteor. Further, the object was initially reported as “non-maneuvering,” yet it is reported that Avery stated that the object, in addition to “gaining altitude” also “turned shapely to the south” before disappearing. Importantly, the officer stated that no flights were in the air around that area during the time of the sighting.

Later on in the report, officers at Robbins Air Force Base describe something much different. They reported seeing a cylindrical object that looked like an air craft fuselage with no wings. The Air Force took this very seriously, as their first concern appeared to be that it was a missile. However, it does bring up an interesting correlation to the contemporary sightings of the “tic tac” type UAP that were first reported in the USS Nimitz incident.

To read more, please visit the JRR Blue Book Blog.

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💥 JRR Archive Sale 💥

To help fund my upcoming show (and general life), I’m going through my archive to find loving homes for some older work. I have a pretty robust travel & landscape photography practice that I don’t often showcase on this account, though I’m trying to find ways of incorporating that aspect more into my larger practice.

“Above and Below” was shot as a RAW image at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, in October of 2021 on a Canon 5D Mark IV. We had managed to get to the big island that fall, serendipitously, to coincide with Kilauea’s first significant eruption in several years. To get to the eruption crater, you have to walk down a somewhat long paved road, that is no longer in vehicular use after Kilauea’s eruption and subsequent summit collapse in 2018. The moon happened to be full on the night we visited, creating a contrast of white, celestial light, butting up against the red, terrestrial light from the volcano.

For sale are two test prints of this image, each an Artist’s Proof, each at kind of an odd size: a smaller one is 8 15/16 x 13 3/4 inches ($110), and a larger one is 9 3/4 x 14 5/8 inches ($115). The images were printed on Epson Premium Photo Luster by an Epson P5000 inkjet printer. While I may print this image again at some point in the future, this will most likely be the only time I print at these specific sizes. The prints are slightly darker than the digital image, though also slightly less noisy.

I will have a link to purchase in my bio, or feel free to DM me for a direct link or with any questions.

Please note that the price includes all taxes + shipping and handling. If you are local to the Houston metro area and would like to arrange a drop off, please contact me prior to purchasing so I can discount the price.

Volcanoes National Park, Big Island, Hawaii. 2021.

One of my favorite aspects of downtown Galveston are the alleyways - mixtures of wire and wood, a blend of contemporary technology and antiquated systems.

Whenever I do a project, being that I usually work site specifically, I like to spend a lot of time in and around the location where I’m going to build an installation. With that, I’ve been really fortunate over the past few years to spend a lot of time in Galveston; it’s a place that has found a place in my heart due to the welcoming nature of the art community there, along with the island’s quirkiness and history of trauma + uncanny occurrences. Part of the way I like to research my sites is by using a lens, documenting my explorations, recording what I come across. I have a whole series that I haven’t really shown at all of 35mm and 120mm images that I’ve taken on the island over the past several years.

Way back in 2010, when I was finishing my undergrad, I did a body of work that culminated in my BFA Thesis, which was all about how past personal experience combined with popular culture to create current identity. (Specifically, it was about vogue culture, Madonna’s appropriation of that culture, and the ways that cultural simulacrum went on to be a building block for white, gay youth of a certain age.) As a part of this work, I made a cinematic essay that was a big creative push forward for me at the time, though it was admittedly very rough - looking back on it now, I cringe at the quality of footage, editing mistakes and general lack of refinement; though to be fair, it was the first substantial video work that I ever made. used to have a bi-yearly film festival of internet-based video work, that coincided with a Vimeo-sponsored three day conference in New York, and I submitted my video essay on a whim, hopeful, but not really expecting it to go anywhere - lo and behold, it got shortlisted, and I got to go be apart of the festival. It was great validation for me at the time and a sign that I was on the right track with an idea, when I had no real external input on my work outside of school. Ironically, I haven’t made a large, narrative, video work since, not purposefully so, mostly because I found installation to be more personally rewarding. (Going to grad school shortly after also had huge influence in my lack of video making, but that’s a whole different story.) But looking back, I can see how related my video work is to my installation work, in terms of the locality of ideas in a 4D environment versus a 3D. It’s all interconnected.

Looking at this graphic now, I’m blown away by my company in this, Richard Mosse, for one. I also think David Lynch was a judge for the finalists, and I wasn’t an uber-fan of his like I am now, which is good, because I may have been too nervous to submit the work!

Project Blue Book Site Visitation: Fort Bliss Army Base, El Paso, Texas. No designated Blue Book case file number shown on cover sheet.

Visitation/documentation date Friday, September 06, 2023, 10:38; original sighting dates: Monday, March 06, 1950, at 06:45 MST hours (CST is listen on the cover sheet, though MST is used in the report.) The sky was mostly clear on the day of visitation, with some scattered clouds. No observed phenomena on day of visitation.

On the morning of Monday, March 6, 1950, two soldiers, 1st Lt. Philip W. Arrant and Cpl. Johnie L. Adams, (whose hobbies were apparently golf and tennis), reported seeing a very slow moving object at about 6:45am, outside of their topless Jeep, about 30 yards NW of the flagpole at Fort Bliss. They first thought it was a star, as it appeared as a light silver color. They observed the object for about 40-60 seconds, as it appeared to reflect light from the sun, until it faded out of sight. Arrant and Adams were considered by the report to be “intelligent, trustworthy, and have character above reproach.” The report decided the object the two soldiers saw was Venus. (Many of the filed reports of UFO sightings coming from both Fort Bliss and Biggs Airfield during the Grudge/Blue Book years were decided to be Venus.)

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A detail from my 2022 show, “Travel in Light Years”: as the afternoon sun came into the gallery space through southward facing windows situated towards the ceiling, dichroic film on those windows would produce yellow-hued light that would interact with displayed artifacts laid out on sheets of thick plexi, reflecting the rays. All transparent surfaces in the show (windows, plexi tables) were coated with this dichroic film that was both super reflective and changed color depending on light intensity. The artifacts on these flat horizontal surfaces were mined locally, from dig sites around Galveston, giving clues to the history of industrial inhabitance on the island: scraps of metal used in shipping, horseshoes, iron signage, railroad spikes and so on. Anyone who knows Galveston knows that a large part of the island’s legacy is its determination to rebuild itself after catastrophe. These artifacts of its history are often hiding just out of sight, frequently being able to be pulled up from just inches below the ground surface.

Travel in Light Years:
Artifacts & devices adapted to
traverse the precarious spectrum
In/Between
Homofuturism and the superannuated
as an exile in a land
of glorious f/utility.

Galveston Artist Residency Gallery
Galveston, Texas
August - November, 2022.

Project Blue Book Site Visitation: Between Manassas and Woodbridge, Virginia. No designated Blue Book case file number shown on cover sheet.

Visitation/documentation date Sunday, December 31, 2023, 15:08; original sighting dates: Friday, February 03, 1967, at 22:30Z and again at 01:25Z hours. The sky was mostly clear on the day of visitation.

On Friday, February 03, 1967, during the late night/early morning hours, two documented witnesses between Manassas and Woodbridge, Virginia, observed a silver object in the sky that sometimes had a red, blinking light. The witnesses observed the object until it dropped below the horizon. The object could very well have been the Echo II balloon-satellite, launched a couple of years prior, and projected to have been over the area at the time of the observed object. (Project Echo has a fascinating history unto itself, as being the first “passive” satellite communications experiment.) In this case, it could also not be determined as to if both witnesses were actually observing the same object. Ultimately, it was determined the undetermined object was most likely either Echo II or a commercial plane.

Not to add in the “woo” here, but there is also a history of purported UFO sightings that mimic terrestrial human aircraft (both John Keel and Jacques Valle have talked much about this); so, really, unless there’s specific evidence to place a specific object during a specific place and time as something blatantly identifiable, (i.e. a specific aircraft trajectory over the exact location that a sighting occurred) much of these Project Blue Book files are a fool’s errand*, because due to the nature of “the phenomenon”, it would be almost impossible to determine what is real, what is imaginary, what has been enhanced by faulty human memory and, what has been placed intentionally to deceive, either by human hands or otherwise.

*🙋

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I sold this drawing, quite unexpectedly, to a very gracious private collector a few weeks ago. It was made while I was preparing for and installing “Travel in Light Years”, in Galveston, while I was staying on the island. Anyone who knows me knows how important Galveston is for me as a site, and the work I make from there continues to be fruitful for me in many ways. It’s also, I think, the first drawing I’ve sold - I work so ephemerally most of the time, I rarely sell work (something I’m trying to change), so it provided a nice confidence boost to try to get more work out there that folks respond to. I’ve posted about this in the past, but my drawing practice is relatively new for me, I’m still figuring it out; so, here’s to more of all the above.

Galveston Drawing 2022-1
14” x 11”
Gel pen on Bristol Board
2022-2023

Project Blue Book Site Visitation: Holloman Air Force Base, Otero County, New Mexico. “Incident Number” 359 (I believe of Project Grudge).

Visitation/documentation date Tuesday, September 05, 2023, 16:28; original sighting dates: Thursday, May 12, 1949, between 21:15 and 21:30 hours. The sky was perfectly clear on the date of visitation.

The witness in this case is a “Dr. Menzel of Harvard”. Between 9:15pm and 9:30pm, Dr. Menzel was leaving Holloman AFB, and witnessed, over the Sacramento Mountain Range, a star that he did not recognize. After a short period, he observed another unknown star that looks “fuzzy”, he assumed, due to atmospheric haze. Dr. Menzel initially assumed the stars were Castor and Pollox from the Gemini constellation, though he later realized that they could in fact not be due to their exact position and “fuzziness”. The witness provided a drawing of what he saw over the mountain range.*

“Dr. Menzel” (whose name was redacted in one part of the files, yet provided in another) is actually Dr. Donald Howard Menzel, who oversaw the Harvard Observatory from 1952 to 1966, and was one of the first theoretical astrophysicists in the United States. Dr. Menzel was one of the foremost researchers on the sun and its corona, and he developed the first “coronograph” in the United States, where, during a solar eclipse, the corona halo from the sun could be studied. He wrote 26 books over his lifetime, with his A Field Guide to the Stas and Planets becoming a best seller in 1975, just a year before his death.

Interestingly, especially in relation to this Blue Book report, Dr. Menzel spent much of his life attempting to debunk UFO reports, even though he was less of a skeptic than he often portrayed in public. Menzel was a strong proponent of the theory that UFOs had natural explanations, from celestial events to effects from temperature inversions. He actually had his own UFO experience in 1955, in which he says he saw a “flying saucer” on his way travelling back from the North Pole, that he eventually resigned to being a mirage of the star Sirius.

Folks often ask me how I show this work I’m doing with the Blue Book files; this is an example of how I showed one report for “Travel in Light Years”, framed simply, and hung in conjunction with a piece dichromatic film that had a gallery light positioned to shine through it - I had a fan going in the space, which blew the film and made it move slightly. The report itself was from Galveston (I posted it in my feed here on Instagram a while back, it’s there if anyone wants to see it). I’ve been torn on just how site specific I want the work to be - on one hand, I wonder if the act of actually traveling to these sites may be specific enough. If I had unlimited resources and opportunity, I would do my general site-specific installation work based on each location where there is a file, with the reports incorporated into that larger body of work, like I did for “Travel in Light Years”. But, that show was the result of five years of being really integrated with Galveston, along with getting a grant make the work financially feasible. I realize the limitations in being able to do that for so many sites, the main one being a general human lifespan. (And, you know, funding.) Ultimately, I’ve also been thinking about a book (or even volumes), but I would want to make it more than just the report + photos of the sky. There’s also research to be done on the copyright limitations of publishing unclassified government files. In the end, it’s a body of work that’s continually unfolding, and I am comfortable with the physical manifestations of it shifting with time.

Project Blue Book Site Visitation: Tallassee, Alabama. No known Blue Book case number, although a “AISS_UFOB_640_57” appears on one of the case file cover sheets.

Visitation/documentation date January 06, 2024; original sighting dates: November 19 + 20, 1957, between 2000 and 2100 hours. The sky was heavily cloudy on the day of visitation.

It was reported that a witness saw a “tear shaped object” that was moving up and down, while not touching the ground, for about 40 minutes. It is unclear as to whether the witness saw the same thing on both November 19th and 20th, or if there were two duplicate reports filed. Blue Book ultimately deemed that there was “insufficient information” and stated the that object could have been either Venus or a star.

On many Blue Book reports, there is a lot of handwriting, and I have yet to determine exactly whose it is. Is it J. Allen Hynek’s himself? Or USAF Captain Edward Ruppelt, who was the director of both Projects Grudge and Blue Book? Or an unnamed secretary?

Tallassee, Alabama was originally “Talisi”, named so by the Muskogee-Creek Native American population, by at least 1540, when Hernando de Soto came upon it during his military expeditions through the American southeast. “Talisi” means “Old Town” in Creek, and the surrounding area was a capital city in the Creek culture. The Creek were removed from the area in the 1830s during the Trail of Tears, following decades of of both internal civil battles among the Creek and external skirmishes between settlers, egged on and encouraged by the United States government, after the Creeks objected to territorial settler expansion. The Creeks who were forcibly relocated to “Indian Territory” (now present day Oklahoma), also named a settlement there “Talisi”, which eventually became what we know as Tulsa.

(Continued in comments.)

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