At Fawn Rogers’ latest exhibition, the oyster is your world. The gallery space of “BURN, GLEAM, SHINE,” the Los Angeles-based artist’s first-ever solo exhibition in Asia, is engulfed in paintings dedicated to the shellfish. Vivid and shimmering against monochromatic backgrounds, Rogers’ oysters dance between photorealism and abstraction, delicacy and sensuality. Tinged with erotic overtones, they also convey a hint of menace, looming larger than life on canvases up to 2 meters tall.
Life or death, desire or despair? These unresolved tensions are the key to understanding the eco-feminist themes of Rogers’ art. The oyster is the ultimate symbol through which she explores the paradoxes of life. Transcending their physical form, they encompass the complexities of human existence, and hold a mirror to the fractured dynamics between humanity and the natural world.
Everything, everywhere all in an oyster
“Rogers’ fascination lies in the inherent tension embodied by the oyster: birth and death, innocence and corruption. The lustrous pearl, representing fertility and purity, is formed in response to an irritant in the oyster shell; it becomes the oyster’s undoing when humans farm and harvest the shellfish to attain the jewel.”
“Today, society has built a world based on binaries — human and nature, masculinity and femininity, chastity and sexuality — which inevitably result in systemic inequalities when one element is favored over the other. The oyster, Roger believes, subverts these dualities by embodying them simultaneously. Through her artwork, she invites viewers to examine the vastness and fluidity of life beyond the rigid limits of an anthropocentric worldview.”.
Appropriate to such magnitude of meaning, the paintings of “BURN, GLEAM, SHINE,” are designed to offer a visceral viewing experience. By scaling them up dramatically, Rogers emphasizes her oysters’ fragility and sensuality. The oyster is traditionally taken as an aphrodisiac for their valves resembling the human vagina. Rogers lauds this unbridled feminine sexuality in her “pussy paintings,” deliberately teasing out the innuendo with fleshy colors, soft shapes.
“I love to see grass breaking through concrete. The grass says, ‘I owe you nothing,’ yet it keeps giving.” — Fawn Rogers
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