While generally considered to be a Lighting expert and Light Artist Roger has always been responsible for the original concept and production design of his projects.
Currently he is exhibiting his work from 1968 and 2022 in a group show of Light Artists at the LIGHT SOURCE EXHIBITION at the Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra which runs through to October 20.
SOME CAREER HILIGHTS from a 60 year professional career
Roger Foley - Fogg aka Ellis D Fogg
Ellis D Fogg is the collective name of the changing group of artists working under Rogers direction.
Ellis D Fogg was the pseudonym under which Roger Foley produced his light shows in the Sixties. Now known as Roger Foley-Fogg he has been described as Australia’s most innovative lighting designer and lumino kinetic sculptor by the Music Director of Vivid Stephen Ferris
In 1963 Roger began designing and producing entertainments for commercial purposes provided he was given complete authority and artistic freedom. These shows were the genesis of the Event Industry for which he is a major innovator..
Roger produced an early, perhaps the first, work of performance art in Australia in 1968 “Destruction in Art” at UNSW with poet Jenni Nixon.
He exhibited an early environment/installation at Watters Gallery, “WOOM" in 1971, with Vivienne Binns which was praised by Surrealist James Gkeeson as “the art of the future”
and in 1971-3 was a member of The Yellow House artists commune with Martin Sharp, Albie Thoms and George Gittoes in Potts Point.
In the early 70s Roger produced Lightshows for ‘The Proms’, ABC concerts, with the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, Peter Sculthorpe and John Hopkins.
Roger also presented an installation with Fujiko Nakaya at the AGNSW, Biennale of Sydney, 1978 “FOG in FOGG”.
Roger has twice been a finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art and won Best Float Award for the 1989 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
In the 1990s he directed lumino kinetic projections on the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and also produced an installation for the Historic Houses Trust, ‘The face of Luna Park on Hyde Park Barracks’.
In 1993 he was the producer and designer of ‘Artists for Labor’ a concert of Australian talent in support of the successful re-election of Prime Minister, Paul Keating. The Prime Minister thanked Roger publicly at his Victory Dinner in Parliament House, Canberra and by mail. See attached letter.
From 2000 to 2008 Roger worked with five Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley, producing light shows for the Gija people, assisting them to tell their stories.
since 2019 Roger has an ongoing project - permanent Sixties lighting of the Heritage Rainbow Village of Nimbin.
Roger is now handing over his life work to a new generation of Light Artists LIQUIDELIC, and AWUWA and ARCHERINGA under the control of Light Artist, Yao Mikami. And to Rusty Roorda in the Blue Mountains.
