Fawn Rogers

Free of God, 2021, oil on canvas, 65” x 85”

Working across painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation, Fawn Rogers’ practice explores the fraught relationship between human nature and the unbuilt world, with its many contradictions and cognitive dissonances. How to reconcile the fact that the human’s role in the entire scope of Earth's existence “is both hilariously small and frighteningly disastrous?” Her constellatory bodies of work, while playful and humorous, explore the convergence of eroticism and extinction in the anthropocentric era.

Atmorelational, 2021, oil on canvas, 85” x 65”

Historically, systems of dominance have been achieved through the construction of binary oppositions that favor the oppressor—man/woman, mind/body, white/other and so on. Rogers’ practice, by contrast, situates itself precisely within the tension between these binaries; the / between words providing the trellis upon which her ideas and expression take root and expand. Echoing Carl Jung’s sentiment that only the paradox could come close to comprehending the fullness of life, Rogers is drawn to universal objects, materials, and symbols—such as nails, soil, cars, seashells or teeth—that exist on the threshold of multiple, contradictory meanings. She collects these symbols, using them as footholds to formally and viscerally engage with the hyperobjects of our present reality.

Bhleg (The World is Your Oyster), 2023, oil on canvas, 65” x 85”

Burn, Gleam, Shine engages with the iconography of the oyster and its loaded, dichotomous connotations of the sacred and profane: a symbol of chastity, fertility, and sacred knowledge, as well as carnal pleasure, decadence and greed. Even the precious pearl, harvested and cultivated for millenia, is the result of an irritant, a corruption of the oyster's pith. Shellfish are dirty—bottom feeders capable of individually filtering 150 liters of water a day—yet prized for their delicacy. And while the oyster embodies all these dualities and tensions, it also destabilizes them completely. For all their associations with the female sexual form, oysters are in fact hermaphroditic, beginning as males and developing into females throughout their life cycle.

Happy as a Clam #2 (The World is Your Oyster), 2021, oil on canvas, 85” x 65”

Works from this series will be exhibited in Burn, Gleam, Shine, a solo exhibition with Galerie Marguo at K11 MUSEA (18 Salisbury Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong), on view July 26–August 19, 2023.

Speciagua (The World is Your Oyster), 2021, oil on canvas, 65” x 85”

Fawn Rogers (b. 1974, Portland, Oregon) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Come Ruin or Rapture, Galerie Marguo (Paris, 2023); GODOG, Lauren Powell Projects (Los Angeles 2023); Burn, Gleam, Shine, Galerie Marguo at K11 (Hong Kong, 2023); Your Perfect Plastic Heart, Wilding Cran Gallery (Los Angeles, 2023); Violent Garden, The Lodge (Los Angeles, 2017); and Subject, Museum of Art and History (Lancaster, California, 2016). Select group exhibitions include Beach, Nino Mier Gallery (New York, 2023); L.A. Woman, Phillips (Los Angeles, 2023); My Body, My Business, Sotheby’s (New York, 2023); Art Paris 2023 Presentation, Galerie Marguo, (Paris, 2023); Solitude, Nexx Taipei (Taiwan, 2023); Boil Toil & Trouble, Art In Common (Miami, 2022); You Me Me You, Nicodim Gallery (Los Angeles, California, 2022); Holy Water, Eric Firestone Gallery (East Hampton, New York, 2022); Don’t Give Me Flowers, Praz-Delvallade (Los Angeles, California, 2022); Everything Has Its Place, Sevil Dolmaci (Istanbul, 2021); and Yes Yes it is Burning Me, Mykonos Biennale (Mykonos, Greece, 2019) among many others.