FAWN ROGERS

Beginning with her two-channel video ‘The World is Your Oyster’, Rogers began her recent series of oyster paintings. On view in the exhibition are ‘Happy as a Clam’ and ‘The Most Beautiful Pearls Are Black’ both of which are representational yet surreally large portraits of oysters. They teeter between realism and abstraction depending on your point of view and distance. According to the artist, “the world is your oyster' which was often said to young people with life ahead of them, is in fact a ‘phrase of passionate violence directed toward the pursuit of one's own desire.” The oysters are both luxurious rarities that produce pearls, aphrodisiacs that encourage the erotic, and toxic mollusks that cleanse the sea of its pollutants. A portrait of these creatures encompasses life, sex, and death simultaneously. The cultivation and harvesting of oysters for pearls is violent and extractive while also being sensual and opulent—a concise symbol of the decadence and unsustainability of our current time.

Fawn Rogers (born in Portland, Oregon) is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist. Through painting, photography, video, and sculptural installation, Rogers addresses the idea of power as the currency of nature and human interaction, while her aesthetic incorporates realism, conceptualism, and the synthesis of text and image. Concerned with systems of the natural world and social constructionism, her art accepts nature as a full range of existence, including violence, innocence, and invention.