James Rotz

Kibbutz of Desire

The ‘kibbutz of desire,’ a completely malleable notion, a semi-indiscernible phrase, surrounds the basic premise of finding the community for which you yearn, feeling secure and supported within it, without forgoing your individuality. Amending this premise, I add the notion of accepting your environment in its totality including the negative attributes, physical and otherwise, rather than fighting, complaining, and ridiculing those attributes, you accept them, while reimaging the space or redefining the space’s poetics, these elements that provide identity, history, and personality. Why limit poetics to the literary or any other epistemology? Apply it to the immediate surroundings, everyday, instead of leaving it in one sole realm, allow the self to oscillate, to be approachable and receptive; then how would you redefine yourself relative to the spaces you regularly occupy, what would they show you, what would you add to these spaces? This is not about knowing or realizing what you have, it is an attempt to comprehend what you’ll never be able to verbalize with complete assurance in our daily epiphanic experiences, or as Wordsworth referred to them, “spots of time.”

The project, Kibbutz of Desire, a story communicated through prose and photographs, is a singular entity composed in three volumes creating a triptych of sorts. Each volume reflecting a unique lens, theme, and stage. The books were composed relative to a timeline, but with the books' covers being purposely unmarked, the volumes are able to be read/viewed in any order; reflective of how a life is lived with a beginning and end...yet, memories, observations, and ideas colliding and reacting at points that do not quite adhere to a linear framework...a timeline that is more circular in shape yet spiraling above each layer of experience representing a path similar to a gyre. The Kibbutz of Desire is a conversation with the past about the present looking towards the future present. It is about Pessoa’s “millimeters of infinitesimal things” communicating with us about our environment and the mystery of life related to the ancient present, ancient because everything when it did exist, existed in the present. By using photographs to examine pauses within time, the books, utilizing a filter, look through the experienced past informing interpretations of the current present. The work is an admission of powerlessness, over the past which cannot be changed, but by the acknowledgment and the act of reframing memory power transitions from the memory and is placed in the artist’s hands for the viewer’s consumption and interpreation. 

The Region

In his ongoing project The Region, James Rotz investigates and documents the development of Northwest Indiana. A conglomerate of cities that form part of the Chicago metropolitan area, the Calumet Region, as it is commonly called—or “the Region” for short—is home to around one million people. But more notably it is a place, as Rotz observes, “where nature takes a backseat to what humans have created.”

Photographing at night, Rotz creates images in which the absence of human life allows our attention to rest on the elements of infrastructure that characterize the landscape of the region. Power lines cut through nearly every image, and telephone poles and factory smokestacks outnumber the few scattered trees. The scale has grown beyond that of the domestic as power plants and highway overpasses tower over playgrounds and single-family homes. It is as if the real act of living had become an after-thought to the operations that facilitate our way of life. With factories situated beside marinas and baseball fields the implements of industry seem to be out of place, and in some of the pictures one gets the sense we are seeking to protect ourselves from our own creations: fences and barriers punctuate most of these settings and an eerie, perpetual light bathes everything, leaving no dark corners.

Rotz aims to capture the particular qualities of a region—the one where he was born—but he sees what he finds in Northwest Indiana as symptomatic of a sweeping transformation throughout the country. Fascinated with the implications of America’s continued development, he has created a series of photographs that begs the viewer to consider how certain values take hold and to weigh the effects of their dissemination on a larger scale.

Being a stereotypical photographer, he is more comfortable behind than in front of a lens. James Rotz began his studies with a Bacehelors in literature and writing from Purdue University-Calumet, then moved on to photography at Indiana University with a BFA, and culminating his studies with a MFA from the University of Michigan. Currently, James works as a photographer for the Detroit Institute of Arts documenting the almost 40,000 pieces of objects that constitute its prints, drawings, & photography collection. Along with the museum and personal work, James has three beautiful, intelligent, caring, and generally amazing boys. 

The Region images are available as 15 x 15" and 23 x 23" pigment print in editions of 35 for $650 and $1,000 respectively.

Kibbutz of Desire images are available as 15 x 15" pigment print in editions of 5 for $350.

Please call: (312) 266-2350 for prices of specific pieces.
Prices are print only unless otherwise indicated.