The World is Your Oyster - two channel video

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.

Alive 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 millennia. Despite being a symbol of incorruptibility, the pearl’s inception hinges on corruption: the introduction of an irritant inside the oyster. In the video the invading object is a plastic sphere manually inserted into the body of the mollusk to create the perfect pearl. This element of intrusion—and the collision of idolatry and industry—mirrors the history of cultivation, exploitation and consumption. An image of both sex and death, oysters are both an aphrodisiac and carriers of Vibrio vulnificus, the world’s most deadly seafood-borne pathogen, killing 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 - oil on canvas

“The world is your oyster” was often said to young people about to embark on adult life. Originating from Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, it exists as a phrase of  passionate violence directed toward the pursuit of one’s desire. In 1918 as the Spanish flu ravaged the world, oyster beds were pillaged and traded on the black market as they were seen to be remedies for the deadly disease. Beginning in 2020 Fawn Rogers revisits these exquisite forms, considering pleasure and pain, nature and industry, fragility and the future.

As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, we each play a role in the sixth extinction. An oyster is paradigmatic of this inevitable destruction and the toll that is taken as humans have become a force of nature. Whether a producer of precious pearls or a gastronomic delicacy, they are expended just the same. The paintings are a form of archiving these creatures, still extant, but currently predicted to disappear in the relatively near future. Further delving into this concept, the works on canvas are scanned into digital assets, which will be packaged for large-scale dissemination in an open-source format in hope to preserve them for our collective memory.

The World is Your Oyster pays homage to these idiosyncratic and complex forms, inviting viewers to consider life, sex, and death simultaneously.  While oysters and mollusks are largely considered feminine—(i.e. Botticelli’s Venus emerging from the shell) this construction of the feminine, from a male perspective, only served as such a device. Ironically, in actuality, the oyster is hermaphroditic, existing between and at times switching genders. Rogers is reforming the image of the oyster in attempt to express the pride a woman could have in her own sexuality. “With underlying sexuality, whether perverse, innocent or anything in-between everyone has a deep sexuality. My work is about the love I want to give to the world,” say Rogers.

Rogers’ paintings of various mollusks are rendered in larger than life scale (85 x 65 inches). They are astounding for their technical virtuosity as well as their sublime characteristics. The canvases appear photorealistic from afar but reveal painterly characteristic and abstract shapes and forms of their creation as one draws near. One is lured in by the seductive contours of each shell that is depicted by her hand, at times a mussel may appear vaginal, a utilization of visual mechanisms reminiscent of Renate Bertlmann’s phallic appendages, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party plates, Betty Tompkins anatomical genitalia, or Hannah Wilke’s folded forms. In these paintings Rogers’ exhibits reverence for predecessors, artists such as Marilyn Minter, Megan Marrin, Rona Pondick, Sarah Lucas, and Louise Bourgeois. Many of the mollusks in Rogers’ series are set out erotically unencumbered, with one or more luminescent pearls protruding from beneath the flesh. While oysters are commonly considered luxurious rarities forged by nature, like many things, human intervention has subverted the organic process of their creation. —Kathy Battista