The World Is Your Oyster

[two-channel video, 2020]

Coalescing the visceral and ephemeral, violent and sensual, The World Is Your Oyster offers a provocative meditation on totality, [d]evolution, and the anthropocene. Presented in two-channel video, the work explores various manifestations of the oyster and other mollusks— life, harvest, cultivation, consumption— against a visual/aural dynamic at once discordant and hypnotic. Contraposing the multi-layered, precious, and luminescent pearl with slicing, shucking, prodding, extraction, and torrents of colorless blood, the project is, like its subject, at once lurid and intimate, vividly organic and exquisitely orchestrated.

In both concept and execution, this work engages with the artist’s GODOG series, most notably the Pussy Buddha. At the onset, she appears both on screen and facing a screen, straddling a patch of shoreline riddled with shells. In this interstitial space between ocean and land, artificiality and nature, she observes the surgical insertion/manipulation of oysters to create pearls. Both voyeur and voyeurized, she mediates between the viewer and image, serving as both spectator and gateway into a profusion of lusciously juxtaposed footage.

Rife with connotations of sensuality, sanctity, and invasion, the oyster has long been associated with the erotic. Works of art from Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus to Steen’s The Oyster Eater portray the oyster as a symbol of lust, pleasure, opulence, and indulgence. Traditionally evocative of the feminine, oysters are naturally protandric, or sequentially hermaphroditic, shifting gender from male to female over the course of their lives. This fluidity underscores a more evolved conceptualization of gender and nature, with nuanced implications for the pearl’s status as a symbol of divinity and transcendence.

Emblemizing purity, fertility, and hidden or sacred knowledge, the commercial pith of the oyster, the pearl, has been harvested and cultivated for millenia. Despite being a symbol of incorruptibility, the pearl’s inception hinges on corruption: the introduction of an irritant into the body of the oyster. This invading object can be organic or inorganic: a parasite, a particle, the oyster’s own eggs, or, as implemented by 12th century pearl farmers, even images of the Buddha. This element of intrusion and the collision of idolatry and industry, mirrors the history of cultivation. Like many aquaculture creatures, the oyster is prized but also habitually compromised for its delicacy. An image of both sex and death, oysters are both an aphrodisiac and carriers of Vibrio vulnificus, the world’s most deadly seafoood-borne pathogen, killing up to one in five of those afflicted. Holding these elements in tension, The World Is Your Oyster calls to mind the explicit contrast of luxurious excess and bleak commoditization in Mika Rottenberg’s NoNoseKnows, but veers toward implicating the viewer in the pleasure and violence of consumption.

Bookending the Pussy Buddha’s immanence/transcendence, the video concludes with side-by-side footage of a perfect, symmetrically reflected golden pearl and the plunder of the ocean floor. This final juxtaposition recalls Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych, in which birth and death are laterally positioned, mediated by a suspended, floating human in an interstitial void. Here, likewise, the viewer of The World Is Your Oyster finds herself: suspended between perfection and annihilation, creation and destruction.

As conflictual as it is compelling, The World Is Your Oyster is ultimately a work of excision, at once violating and seductive, ravishing in all senses, all-consuming and offered up for consumption. At the center of these contradictions, the viewer is present as a literal embodiment of the anthropocentric. Whether transfixed, revulsed, or seduced, the viewer’s experience is inevitably one of implication, engagement, and complicity. The world is, after all, your oyster.

The World Is Your Oyster

[paintings, 2020]

Poisonous Harmony

[paintings, 2020]

In a lush, vivid co-mingling of poison and pleasure, Poisonous Harmony offers a sprawling vision of life and death, sex and danger, portent and paradox. Conceived and executed under the condition of worldwide pandemic, the work is at once fragmentary and cohesive, presenting a rich dynamic of conflict, indulgence, and inexplicable harmony.

The most beautiful things can often kill you. Illustrating this paradigm, human forms are spliced and intercut with a variety of natural forms, all of which are potentially lethal: the poisonous pitohui bird; the amygdalin-laced apricot; the highly toxic yellow dart frog; the aptly named ‘murder hornet’; the fatally urushiol-laden unprocessed cashew nut; the wild mushroom, alternately utilized as medicine, hallucinogen, and poison; the fatally intoxicating buttercup; the lovely but venomous cone snail; and the oyster, obsessively hoarded during the 1918 influenza epidemic, at once a carrier of the symbolically sacred pearl and the most deadly seafood-borne pathogen on earth. Optically spherical pearls emblemize nature, industry, and a multiplicity of ideals, while the Venetian grotto chair, artfully modeled after the scallop shell, offers a rich symbol of eroding civilizations and the ubiquity of the Anthropocene.

In the vivid sprawl between the two grotto chairs, the pearl alternately serves as an absorptive presence, a surface for lounging, a recurring object that appears to have been either delicately placed or casually strewn, and hovering above a Venus-like torso in lieu of a head. The span of the painting itself seems to exemplify the interstitial locus inhabited by shells and pearls, an area that is neither life nor death, ocean nor land: a richly shifting present between varied histories and imagined futures.

The work notably interacts with Rogers’s GODOG series, comprised of sculptural, material, and video art highlighting diverse identities and the evolution of gender. Figures such as the playful, provocative Pussy Buddha, a languorous reimagining of the classical Sleeping Hermaphroditus, an androgynous dual-faced angel, and incarnations of phallic fetish figures appear in various states of candor and poise, mourning and bliss, isolation and connection.

Aesthetically redolent of the vibrant, imaginative world-building of Hieronymus Bosch, Poisonous Harmony conjures a wonderland of contradictions. Even the dominant color, a reinvention of chrome yellow pigment— a highly toxic favorite of Van Gogh’s— has historically been used to signal both danger and the divine, and was once culturally heralded as the color ‘associated with all that was bizarre and queer in art and life.’ Encapsulating a myriad of perceptions, Poisonous Harmony invites the viewer to a world at once edenic and bewildering, rife with things that fester and flourish, harm and delight— a garden of light and beauty that might very well kill you.

– A. J. Bermudez

Eat Me

[paintings, 2020]

In a striking blend of playfulness and provocation, Eat Me offers an exploration of coexistence, consumption, and the intricate dynamics between humans and the natural world. The series is comprised of individually hand-painted boxes, each of which originally contained canned seafood. Layered with phrases like “wild cockles,” “extra virgin,” “lightly smoked,“ “sustainably caught,” and “hand-packed,” reenvisioned human figures appear in a full spectrum of skin colors— a multitude of diverse origins also present in The World Is Your Oyster, Orgy Pillows, and Thrill and Sorrow— in an array of poses ranging from mischievously childlike to languidly seductive.

In a confluence with Rogers’s larger body of work, numerous personas from the GODOG series are represented. These include the Pussy Buddha, a forward-looking, sexually actualized incarnation of the Venus motif, along with gender-fluid and phallic-headed forms. Conveying an impression at once engrossing and disturbing, other human figures appear as fragmented bodies, with absent heads or cleanly detached and scattered limbs. These figures appear in a state that might be perceived as a playful reinvention of anthropomorphization or as cross-species kinship with the oysters, sardines, and other sea animals for whom the boxes are intended.

With characteristic humor and nuance, Rogers threads a line between explicit and implicit ideations. The focal point of the boxes— along with recurring references to their tightly packed contents— implies an object to be unpacked. This presentational twist calls to mind the box art of Lucas Samaras, with its multi-layered implications and nuanced structures. While evading rigidly proselytic interpretations, the series is clearly informed by the aquaculture status quo: unlike terrestrial creatures, sea animals are measured by weight rather than unit, and aquarium pets are rarely given a burial as dignified as their mammalian counterparts. Yet Rogers seems keen on blending the concepts of casualty and causality, acknowledging her own entrenchment in the practice of consumption: “I’d wake up in the middle of the night and paint, and this is what I would eat. As humans, the experience of being alive— even creating something— always has an element of destruction.”

Rogers’s intentionality extends to the series’ presentation, which deliberately compiles small, individuated paintings and objects (redolent of the neo-Dada minutiae of Tetsumi Kudo) into an expansive, immersive display extending nearly two stories in height. Ultimately, Eat Me is both humorous and harmonious, confrontational and coy— an intimate glimpse of convergence, consumption, and creation.

– A. J. Bermudez

A New World

[paintings, 2020]

A NEW WORLD

With evocative vibrance and subtlety, a series of paintings by artist Fawn Rogers explores the interplay between presence and absence, obsolescence and isolation, evolution and extinction.

Strikingly hand-painted against vivid monochromatic backgrounds, each painting highlights the grotto chair, a potent symbol of both human invention and the natural world. Fabricated in Venice— a city whose gradual descent into the sea is itself a reminder of the transience of human civilization— the chairs appear as both lonely and luxuriant, a recollection of the chair’s history as reserved for royalty. In a remarkable progression from obscurity to ubiquity, the chair is rarely mentioned in antiquarian texts (the Bible makes no reference to chairs, despite copious references to thrones), and Shakespeare utilizes the chair predominantly as a symbol for royal claims and personages. Instated as an object of opulence in ancient Egypt, the chair surged in production and use during the 18th and 19th centuries, a shift reflected in literature and exemplified by the shell-inspired aesthetics of Rococo design in the 1700s.

With aesthetics that bridge the sculpturally ornate and the darkly cadaverous, A New World recalls the architecturally structured, high-contrast photographs of Ruth Bernhard, including such works as Shell in Silk and Banded Murex Deep Sea Scallop. Both visually and historically, there is a spectral dynamic to the beauty of an empty shell. The scallop shell serves as a symbol of rebirth in Christianity, as well as a pre-Christian Celtic symbol of death. In the 19th century, Oliver Wendell Holmes identified the empty shell as a symbol of the human soul passing into eternal life. This interstitial space between life and death is reinforced by the natural habitat of the seashell: a setting that is perpetually suspended between water and land, wilderness and civilization.

Inspired by the scallop, the grotto chair makes an appearance in several of Rogers’s works, including The World Is Your Oyster and the GODOG series. In these works, mollusks and their shells recurrently emblemize the diverse conflicts and collusions among nature and industry.

Etymologically, the root of scallop derives from *skel-, meaning to cut. In a significant twist of meaning, this linguistic heritage is shared with both skeleton and sculpture— things at once powerful and delicate, the height of nature and art, yet doomed to outlast the bodies and cultures they inhabit. An empty scallop shell once contained—and was created by—

the life inside it. Likewise, the empty grotto chair captures the height of beauty and creation, as well as their inevitable loss.

In its melancholic depiction of a single empty chair— and an aesthetic tendency toward rich textures and amorphous lines— the work calls to mind Van Gogh’s paintings Gauguin’s Chair and Vincent’s Chair, conveying both humanity and profoundly felt absence. In Rogers’s depictions, the chair often appears as both exquisite and forlorn, a balance underscored by the hauntingly repetitive dynamic of the series. Redolent of the mass production of chairs during the Industrial Revolution, this repetition also conjures the dreamlike, elegiac contrasts present in Andy Warhol’s Shadows series.

Despite the visual absence of human figures, the element of humanity is deeply conveyed in absentia. Rogers’s notes: “Viewers often express a visceral longing to see someone in the chair. The absence of a human figure creates a question, a sense of incompletion and speculation.” With an approach both historically grounded and keenly prescient, A New World offers a meditation on opulence and fragility, ubiquity and seclusion: creation and curation as human artifact.

– A. J. Bermudez

GODOG. Venus Shrines and the Height of Love

[published, 2020]

GODOG. Venice Shirnes and the Height of Love

“My definition of feminism is the simplest one. It’s the idea that a work of art could portray the power, independence, quality, dignity and identity of women. They should be timeless, and they should be qualities that belong for all women for all time.”

—Mary Beckinsale