For more than two decades the sculptor Ry Rocklen has made ordinary objects misbehave: a rocking chair, a drying rack, a shopping cart, each remade until it is no longer quite what it was. What changed when he left Los Angeles for the high desert around Joshua Tree is what those objects look at. In Desert Lenses, his new exhibition at Wilding Cran Gallery, the landscape becomes the subject, and the debris of the desert does the looking.

The decisive choice is technical. Rocklen remakes his forms in ceramic and wraps them in photography, using glaze decals so that each object carries on its skin an image of the terrain it came from. Steps to Bone-Dry, a folding drying rack, zigzags open onto boulders, scrub and late light. Rolling Stone is a dented car shell stood on end, its panels full of desert. Slice of Life compresses a graffiti-covered bus into a low ceramic block, and Rocky Sunday runs a field of rocks through the curls of a bentwood rocker. The gallery calls the result part sculpture, part landscape, part optical illusion; the more exact description is a still life hidden inside a container.

Ry Rocklen ceramic sculpture of a folding drying rack printed with a high desert landscape — Ry Rocklen, Steps to Bone-Dry, 2026. Photo: Sarah Lyon. Courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran Gallery

The lineage is legible. Writing in Visual Art Source, the critic George Melrod notes that Rocklen is “so often pegged as a 21st century Duchampian”, then sharpens the label: his found forms are not transplanted to the gallery but “laboriously remade and recontextualized.” The distinction matters. Charles Ray, whose experiments with scale, material and perception echo through this work, was among Rocklen’s mentors. A readymade asks what counts as art; these objects ask what an object can see. Melrod reads them as the discards of people who ventured out to “the end of the line” and left things behind.

The second body of work brings the lens closer to home. Rocklen has cast socks worn by members of his family in aluminum and in paper, keeping every rumple and sag. Hung on the walls, they are portraits without faces. In Hyperallergic, Matt Stromberg wrote that each one conveys “a remarkable sense of personality through its rumpled form.” The gallery frames the pairing as a family portrait told through place and perspective: one group of works about a landscape, the other about the people who live in it.

Gallery view of Ry Rocklen Desert Lenses with ceramic sculptures on plinths and cast socks on the walls — Desert Lenses, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran Gallery

A Los Angeles native, Rocklen (born 1978) studied at CalArts before earning a BFA at UCLA and an MFA at USC. He was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. in 2012, and his work belongs to the collections of LACMA and the Hammer. He moved to Joshua Tree in 2020, after the birth of his son and the start of the pandemic. Desert Lenses is his second solo exhibition at Wilding Cran, after Shelf Life in 2024.

The exhibition is on view at Wilding Cran Gallery, 607 N. Western Avenue in Los Angeles, through October 24, 2026. Rocklen will lead a walkthrough of the show on Saturday, October 17, at 4 pm.

Duchamp put a bottle rack in a gallery and called it art. Rocklen brings a drying rack in from the desert and makes it hold the view, a quieter proposition and, in this show, a more generous one.

Tags: Wilding Cran Gallery, contemporary art exhibitions, ceramic sculptures, Charles Ray, Desert Lenses, Joshua Tree