Artist Ry Rocklen turns Joshua Tree’s wrecked cars and rocking chairs into desert lenses

Artist Ry Rocklen turns Joshua Tree’s wrecked cars and rocking chairs into desert lenses

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.