Heisenberg’s Vanitas, Opus 59, 1997
Two glass panels, 19 by 20 inches. Frame, 38 by 54 inches.

Here is a blend of two of Roger’s favorite allegories. The first is the vanitas, the religious warning against hubris, which is exemplified by the legend of Icarus. Roger’s visual icon for this is the dimly seen fossil record in the deep background of the work—Rhamphorhynchus, the flying dinosaur. The second tale is of human folly, the search for all knowledge, summed up by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Roger’s visual rendering of this tale is the trails of graphics created by atomic particle collisions in the cloud chamber, here in alarming red.