Clockshop and artist LaRissa Rogers invite you to join an open call for objects that hold meaning for you and the place you call home as part of subterranean convergence, a sculptural installation and score for performance by Rogers that will open at LA State Historic Park in Fall 2026.

subterranean convergence: Open Call for Objects
March 20 – June 1, 2026
Learn more here.

Read Rogers’s invitation below or here:

Dear friends,

What does it mean to be “at home” in this America? How can we imagine a home-place that invites belonging and is characterized by beauty and justice? 

As we come together to tend to these questions, I invite you to think and co-create with me; a meditation that moves beyond the frameworks of the visible, toward the unseen, and into the subterranean. What if the liberation we seek comes not from the redistribution of power or the recalibration of oppression but rather from cultivating an ability to hold the complexities of the places we call home? How can we come to terms with all their complicated, layered, and buried histories of rooting and uprooting, of voluntary and forced migration, of hope and mourning? How might this help us to work toward a conception of “civic friendship” that allows us to shape a new understanding of justice and freedom?

Reckoning with histories of land, architectural, and cultural dispossession and severance across geographies and time, subterranean convergence, a sculptural installation and score for performance by LaRissa Rogers, commissioned by Clockshop, uses the train as a vessel and metaphor. Exploring public and private memory while repositioning the movements of people and goods, we examine the tensions between the fantasy of flight and groundedness. 

The southern transcontinental railroad, “the Sunset Limited,” connecting New Orleans and Los Angeles represented possibilities for Black, Southern, and new immigrant families, who settled in Los Angeles during the Reconstruction era and the Great Migration. Located at Los Angeles State Historic Park, once the site of the Southern Pacific River Station and the city’s largest employer in the late 19th century, subterranean convergence will trace the movements of people between the American South and West to investigate the ways liberation has been imagined—and where it might still be. A sculptural installation featuring fragmented railroad tracks, resembling the chinoiserie aesthetics found in both Greek Revival architecture in the South and in L.A.’s Chinatown, will showcase replicas of your contributed objects, recast in tabby, which is an ancient building material originating in northern coastal Africa. 

In the service of collaboration, I invite you to identify and offer your personal objects to be reproduced and laid into the reconstructed train tracks. Objects can serve an alternative purpose: not to glorify the past, but to unearth what it means to endure, to reposition what it means to be carried, and to journey through the passage of time toward a new destination.

On the crossing between departure and arrival, what do we carry with us, and what gets left behind?

Sincerely,
LaRissa Rogers

• Honorarium: All contributors whose submissions are accepted will be credited in this project will receive a $50 honorarium for their contribution.
• Selected objects will become part of the sculptural installation subterranean convergence, opening in Fall 2026. Please note that if interest in the project exceeds capacity, acceptance is not guaranteed.

Learn more here.

Storytelling and 3D Scanning Workshops
Participants will have the opportunity to attend an in-person 3D-scanning workshop in Los Angeles or New Orleans or submit photos of your object digitally (using a process called photogrammetry) to create a scan of their object. We’ll also host a virtual session on creating a photogrammetry scan where a 3D technician will be present to walk attendees through the process.

This series of workshop will function as both a site of gathering and an active archive. Together, we will engage in guided story circles led by the artist, sharing and reflecting on the significance of these objects in relation to familial histories, personal lineages, and place. This process centers storytelling as a form of memory-keeping and collective knowledge production.

The in-person workshops will take place in Los Angeles on:

• Thursday, April 16, 2026 from 6–8pm PST at Clockshop.
• Friday, April 17, 2026 from 11am–1pm PST, Santa Monica History Museum.

The virtual session on photogrammetry will take place on:

• Wednesday, May 13 from 6–7:30pm PST.

Workshops dates in New Orleans are coming soon.

Sign up to participate and RSVP for a workshop here!

ABOUT THE ARTIST
LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates how personal and shared memory and history impact the perpetual evolution of cultural identity formation and placemaking. She has exhibited at Documenta 15 (Germany); Weserburg Museum (Germany); Lilley Museum (NV); the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (CA); the California Museum of Photography (CA); the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VA); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA); California State University, Fullerton; The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MA); Torrance Art Museum (CA); and the Fuller Craft Museum (MA). She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2023–2024). Rogers has also held residencies at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art (2022), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), and MASS MoCA (2025). Rogers is a tenure-track assistant professor and sculpture area head at the University of Virginia. She is currently represented by Super Dakota.

CREDITS
subterranean convergence by LaRissa Rogers was commissioned by Clockshop and curated by Cat Yang, Director of Artist Projects, and Isabel Yi Jimenez, Artist Projects Manager. Clockshop’s projects at Los Angeles State Historic Park are supported through our long-standing partnership with California State Parks. The invitation for this open call was created by LaRissa Rogers and Angel Adams Parham.

The production of this work was generously supported by the Hearthland Foundation, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, Anonymous Was A Woman, Accelerated Resilience Los Angeles, Betsy Greenberg, and Clockshop’s generous community of supporters.