Open Source Gallery is pleased to present Slow Roll, an installation by Roger Ferney-Cortés.
Slow Roll transfigures everyday urban artifacts into sculptures that invite viewers to linger within the physical and psychic thresholds of the city. Corrugated steel, once part of a storefront roll-up gate, slips free from its linear frame, unfurling like a weathered scroll. Stray markings and graffiti become new symbols; dents, ridges, and folds are transformed into topographies. Ferney-Cortés builds both abstract and recognizable forms out of the steel roll-up gates, leaning into the unexpected plasticity of the rigid material.
These gestures reveal the structures, patterns, and rhythms that shape our lives as we move unconsciously through them. Spatial, material, and iconographic boundaries are intentionally misaligned, disrupting the illusion of continuity and homogeneity that binds the city together.
Bounded up in these sculptures are the social dynamics that undergird our neighborhoods – barriers that simultaneously protect and exclude, exist privately and publicly, and remain invisible yet present. By playfully departing from their utilitarian origins, these compositions interrupt the relentless rhythm of the city and invite viewers to reconsider the thresholds they cross daily and the layered realities that are mediated through them.
Roger Ferney-Cortés is a Colombian-American artist, architect, and educator based in New York City. His interdisciplinary practice extends across public art installation, assemblage, interactive sculpture, and digital tooling methodologies. Informed by the dialogues and contradictions of urban life, his work sparks nuanced perceptions of the material, political, and social realities of our cities. Through individual and collaborative efforts, Ferney-Cortés’ work has been exhibited at MoCADA, Wave Hill, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, SCI-Arc Gallery, and Pacific Design Center, among other venues. Beyond his studio practice, he has taught at Pratt Institute School of Architecture and he is a co-founding member of Brooklyn based art collaborative Stop 1 Projects.
