Karl LaRocca a.k.a. Kayrock is a Brooklyn based artist and a founding member of Kayrock Screenprinting. He has designed numerous posters, books, and records and worked with many contemporary artists to realize their fine art editions. His work has been collected by MOMA and the Allen Memorial Art Museum.
My new paintings find their structure in folded and unfolded paper crease patterns that are derived from oragami models of regular polyhedra ( tetrahedrons, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, triangular prisms, etc... ) Inside this framework, and the square format that it dictates, I am free to explore relationships of color, creating a faceted surface that shifts the viewer's focus. Silverpoint drawings are used to explore these structures in preparation for the paintings.
In the ATM Reciept series, I take found ATM receipts and redraw them with a mechanical pencil at actual size. The hand translation of the machine printed words and numbers is a meditative process for me, drawing each typeset letter slowly as its own object, instead of writing entire words or sentences. Exposing the amount withdrawn and the balance remaining in various stranger's checking accounts affords a glimpse into their socio-economic strata. The price of the piece is equivalent to the amount of money withdrawn in the original transaction.
The receipt drawings have evolved into larger hand replications of government documents ( Notice, FORM 1040EZ ), cookbook pages ( Cornbread, About Potatoes ) and charts ( Sunrise/Sunset Summer 2010, Player Character Record ). These pieces allow me to pay homage to documents that I love and find comforting, and also to own and conquer some that cause stress.
In the Floorplan series, I research publicly available floor plans of new luxury loft construction in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Redrawing and rearranging them into supersized condos, via mirroring and rotation, I use a computer to calculate the exact square footage of each drawing. Combined with the price per square foot of the actual condominium, this metric is used to calculate the price of each print. Using a graphite dispersion to screen-print a single print of each image, I consider these works assisted drawings rather than print editions.