Mr. Rogers' neighborhood

Here's the only thing you really need to know about Jermaine Rogers: Neil Young calls him before going on tour. So does David Bowie. Oh, and the guys in Radiohead.

Rock stars line up to have Rogers create the poster art for their concert tours, and he typically responds with works that juxtapose colors and images in such a way that they demand attention. Trees sprout from human skin. Teddy bears have red eyes full of fear. Musicians morph into vampires.

It is propaganda of the first order, and it has made Rogers a big deal in the lowbrow art scene.

Rogers moved from his native Houston to Manitou Springs more than a year ago so he could drop out of the scene he knew and start over fresh. Now he's opened a gallery - Dero 72 - in the Manitou Spa Building, and its walls are covered with the evidence of a dream-cometrue career of a music freak.

The move to Colorado marks a shift in his career, or at least an effort to avoid being typecast, as Rogers does fewer posters and more oil paintings, fine art prints, vinyl toys and whatever else the pop art world throws at him. He calls the posters "big, glorified business cards to sell other art."

"Concert posters were the foundation to get me seen, but now that I'm there I want to use my freedom," Rogers said. "The fine art community never has and never will really respect poster art. They tolerate it, but they only tolerate it from guys who paint."

The gallery is just a way to reach out to his new hometown and display his coveted prints for local fans.

The posters sell out on Rogers' Web site, jermainerogers.com, within hours - sometimes minutes - when he releases them, typically in limited editions of 50 to 250, to his waiting horde of worldwide collectors. Ditto with his vinyl toys.

"There are only probably about four or five current artists in the entire concert-poster scene that sell through prints like Jermaine does," said Mitch Putnam, who runs Postersandtoys.com and OMGPosters.com.

"Pretty much everything he releases sells out in minutes.

"You can't really have a conversation about concertposter artists from the '90s to now without Jermaine's name coming up.

"He is definitely one of the very important names among modern rock artists."

Challenging paradigms

A few steps away from the Skee-Ball machines of Manitou's arcade lurks Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.

Dero 72 is a trippy corner of the world where Morrissey lounges with Oscar Wilde, where Lennon and McCartney strike Run-DMC poses, and where Public Enemy's Chuck D springs forth from the head of Frederick Douglass.

Most of all, it is a place where the artist challenges you to unplug from the reality you know and drift into the alternate reality he creates, where Dero bears, white rabbits and the pig-bodied Squire romp and scheme and weave a narrative among the famous faces.

Some are willing to take the journey.

They are transfixed - the younger generation by Radiohead and The Mars Volta, the older generation by Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles - drifting from poster to poster, slack-jawed, soaking in the images.

Then again, some of the tourists who step into his gallery are just looking for trinkets and a ride up Pikes Peak, not a ride into an alternate reality.

They wander in for a moment, look suspiciously at the walls, and quickly leave.

"They'll know within 10 feet of the door if they like it or not," said gallery manager, art student and master Skee-Ball player Bianka Groves. "I probably thought it was freaky, too, the first time I saw it. But I'm around it all the time and I've found other meanings."

Whatever you do, don't call Rogers' art "disturbing." At least not to his face.

"People say that and I don't see it," the 35-year-old artist said in his thoughtful and soft-spoken way. "I don't want to be portrayed that way. I'd like people to come to the art with an open mind and challenge what you are taught to think."

People might be disturbed simply because they are upset by the unexpected, Rogers said. "You know that shock when you expect to drink water and it's vinegar inside?"

He skips over the easy shock value of nudity or obscenity to mess with minds on a more subtle level: with color, composition and content.

As Rogers became more adept at breaking the rules of art, it has become his signature.

But that makes people uneasy in a way that's hard to name - they just know something about the image isn't right.

Rogers wants his fans to linger in that uncertainty. He argues that the natural impulse is to put things and people you encounter inside a box, a mental schema, and then assume you know all about them.

But therein lie the roots of sexism and racism, he says.

The goal of his art is to upset that impulse enough to break through, to cause people to question their assumptions and consider for a moment that everything they think they know is wrong.

Childlike appeal

Rogers said kids aren't freaked out by his art because they come at it without so many assumptions.

"Kids say, ‘Look it's a birdman!' It's adults who are uneasy," Rogers said.

That makes sense, since Rogers' main source of inspiration - besides voracious reading and consumption of imagery - is channeling the pictures that have run through his head since he was a little boy.

"I'm like a 10-year-old, with power," he said.

He works hard to keep that channel open, to scrape away the intervening years, surrounding himself with "Star Wars" toys and icons of his childhood, and watching life through the eyes of his 4-year-old daughter, Gabriella.

He is subversive in that he is profoundly innocent, and aspects of his art that look dark and wild can also be seen as a childlike embrace of magic and wonder.

Rather than take a rigid approach to producing art, Rogers' plan is to live life with the openness of that 10-year-old and see what comes out.

He clearly remembers the moment as a boy when he was at an amusement park and realized that the fuzzysuited creatures walking around were actually people inside costumes.

It blew Rogers' mind that the adults around him and the people in the suits were all playing along in an elaborate game of makebelieve.

He wants to play the same game with his artwork, inviting the viewer into his strange and wonderful neighborhood of makebelieve.

Won't you be his neighbor?

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CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0226 or bill.reed@gazette.com

DETAILS

Dero 72 Studios and Gallery

Where: Manitou Spa Building, 934 Manitou Ave., Suite 103
Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Sundays-Wednesdays and noon-8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays
More info: Call 685-DERO (3376) or check out www.jermainerogers.com

Q&A: ABOUT THE ARTIST

Question: When did Jermaine Rogers first think of becoming an artist?

Answer: When he was in kindergarten. His teacher, stunned by a picture he drew of his family, whisked him off to meet the gifted-student teacher and arranged a meeting with Rogers and his mom in the principal's office. Once he figured out he wasn't in trouble, Rogers knew he had talent.

Q: Did he have formal art training?

A: Rogers is mainly self-taught and informally mentored by other artists.

Q: How did he get started as a professional artist?

A: He had a good job at the planetarium at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, but he quit to become an artist. Financial success eluded him at first - he could only afford to eat once a day for three years. "But I was happy," he said. "Most people are not doing what they want to do because they let opportunity pass by."

Q: How does he choose which bands to create posters for?

A: "I am not one of these guys who can say ‘it's just work.' I have to feel it. I have to feel some sort of vibe with the music."

Q: What music does he like?

A: He gravitates to bands with brains, from Radiohead to Pete Seeger to Public Enemy, and he's a rock connoisseur who is intimately familiar with the past half-century of popular music.

Q: Of all the places in the world, why move to Manitou Springs?

A: Rogers visited Manitou with his family as a kid, so moving there can be seen as part of his quest to keep the conduit open to his childhood. But he also digs the art scene and the weirdness of the town and the challenge of starting over in a new place. And he thinks the presence of the military and conservative religious organizations of Colorado Springs lend the area a creative tension.

Q: Is there an artist he regrets not doing a poster for?

A: Elliott Smith

Q: What does Dero 72 mean, anyway?

A: "Dero" is the name Rogers made up for the 7-foot-tall teddy bears with anxious eyes who inhabit his artwork. The Number 72 has a secret meaning to Rogers that he will not divulge.