In Stratosphere, California photographer Rook uses the Stratosphere Tower to examine the distance between the Las Vegas we are sold and the Las Vegas that actually exists.

The tower appears in every photograph, but it is rarely the true subject. Instead, it becomes a fixed point from which Rook observes the city from unexpected perspectives. Like a recurring “Where’s Waldo,” it anchors each image while directing our attention toward everything surrounding it: the overlooked architecture, ordinary streets, peripheral landscapes, and visual contradictions that exist beyond the familiar mythology of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas presents itself as an oasis of pleasure, wealth, risk, escape, and possibility. But like the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, its meaning changes when the curtain is pulled back. Behind the neon and spectacle is another city, one that is less glamorous and in fact, more revealing.

Rook's images challenge the manufactured image of Las Vegas by looking beyond its most recognizable symbols. The Stratosphere becomes both landmark and decay. Rook reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary and asks 'What do we fail to see when we already believe we know a place?'

There is also a larger shift at work. The Las Vegas of the pre-technological era was one you had to travel into, to enter its carefully constructed world of gambling, entertainment, and possibility. Today, technology has brought much of that experience to our own pocket. Gambling, spectacle, entertainment, and consumption no longer require a trip to Las Vegas.

What remains, increasingly, is the experience of the city itself: a performer with no audience, the performance is excess, the consumption of fantasy.  All that is left is the very 'idea' of Las Vegas.

Stratosphere asks us to consider all of these ideas.

While Stratosphere is ultimately about Las Vegas, it is also about perception, illusion, and the seductive images we construct around ideas and places. Pull back the curtain, and  this does not disappear. It becomes more complicated.