Artist Fawn Rogers On Her Work, Showing at Make Room and the State of the World Today

As I peer through the large glass window of the new one-room solo installation by artist Fawn Rogers, my eyes scan the dozens of small, colorful paintings that pack the walls from floor to ceiling. Some feature mangled automobiles, cigarette-smoking monkeys and ironic cake icing messages, while others offer glimpses of pure nature: rare avian species, bare feet on lush lawns and adorable copulating ducks. Oh, but there’s also the benevolent Dalai Lama, and how about that close-up of grill-capped teeth saddled by sexy snarling lips? Seemingly dissimilar, these images come across like hyper, comic and wanton flashes of late-night television channel surfing—a place where we relinquish our consciousness and will to the oblivion of shock-value programming. Together, in this small white space, I wonder what they mean. I take it all in and pause.

Then, I approach the doorway to the gallery’s [ROOM] space entrance, lowering my gaze to a dense carpet of living, green sod that runs from corner to corner. An unavoidable, center-seated, large furry chess set, entitled R.I.P., now grabs my strict attention. Hand-hewn, patinaed bronze statues of extinct animals act as playing pieces on top of the board, where the faults and follies of humankind are played out by the very victims of our assault against the planet. Luckily, in this safe space, we’re offered a mere game to play, helping us make light—and maybe gain a small semblance of control—of the woes that add up to the inevitable burden of heavy consumerist life as we know it.

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When I ask Rogers, whose show “Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred” closes soon at L.A.’s Make Room, about what chess means to her, she mentions dominance and conquest and tells me she was inspired by the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread… as well as soap chess boards made in prisons.

Dominance, triumph, subjugation, conquest. Whatever happened to strategy—or fun, for that matter? How do we look at games today? I remember a few years ago reading an often-misattributed quote, “Life is just like a game. First, you have to learn the rules of the game. And then play it better than anyone else.” Playing the game of life ‘better than anyone else’ is perhaps the problem. Why? Because we should be in it together reasoning through conflict and attaining harmony, instead of competing for space in the zero-sum fallacy. Of course, our lives can be perceived as an oppositional game-like succession of events—similar to chess—in some ways. Suggesting that “life is a game” might imply that we should approach life—and our obligations to the natural world—as an elective, off-time leisure activity with lesser importance. However, it can also lead to greater investment and interest in responsible living, akin to the ‘flow state’ engagement found in enjoyable games.

So, what might the work of Rogers do? She presents a party-on place to play during our prime-time pop cultural yen for fatal fantasy, meme-making and cosplaying in the virtual land we pay witness to and remotely occupy. But, as she said plainly: “The work hopefully prompts the viewer to appreciate the role they play.” For me, that role means the locked-in-step dance with the real world, the here-and-now, enacting some commitment that will hopefully extend beyond my backyard into the sustainable global realm, a place the artist cares deeply about. So, I decided to look again and engage with Rogers’s objects directly in the real world.

After I get off the phone with the artist, I hop in the car, drive down Hollywood back roads and return to the exhibition space. There’s little conspicuous activity in the area. I see the workaday lineup of whitewashed warehouse soundstages, fast food joints, storage facilities and a gas station. It’s like a no-person’s land between the powerhouse Paramount movie studio and the dying fashion retail sprawl of Melrose Avenue. It’s a fitting location to think about Rogers’s concerns and work. No, it’s not inside an animal sanctuary or a clean energy lobby headquarters on Capitol Hill. Instead, it’s the result of our excess industrial production, the place where motion media stories are generated for dream-drinking audiences, where we fill our cars with fossil fuels and where we store our junk. But the Rogers show—with paintings of mutated but thriving Chernobyl flowers and trees that grow through wrecked car engine bays—is a living, breathing break in it all. It’s sometimes important to pause in the eye of the storm to see where the rapid swirling winds and rising waters might take us.

Despite the sharp urgency and formal manifest outline of the artist’s quest to reflect our foibles and willful exploits in “Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred,” the work seems rather innocent upon second viewing. While deftly made by a seasoned artist, the inner-childlike quality throughout helps represent the installation as a sincere invitation to explore, rather than a cry for help or even a demonstrative lesson. Some art holds a rear view mirror up to our activity at large, some art breaks the mirror into pieces to readjust our perspective and some art creates a new daring path we might take to avoid the pitfalls already experienced. Rogers’ art may well accomplish the first two by examining both the beauty and the profanity of the past, encouraging us to live—and, again, engage—in the present. What about the future, you may ask? It’s uncertain, of course. Until then, we have art to help us out a little.

Observer briefly caught up with Rogers at the exhibition’s tail end to discuss her practice, the show and her thoughts on the world’s current state.

How long have you focused on the many weighty issues central to your work?

I’ve been investigating and creating art about humanity’s demise for over two decades. I don’t have answers about how to ease the suffering caused by the climate crisis, the conflicts of humans versus the unbuilt world, or, of course, humans versus each other. I avoid preaching a dogmatic message and instead focus on capturing the characteristics of our present day—one big end-of-the-world party. When I think about making my work, I feel grandiose piano playing as the ship goes down or party horns blaring as a house burns.

What influences sharpened your formative awareness of the classic human vs. nature conflict that now seems more pronounced than ever?

I grew up in the woods of Oregon, immersed in the wild. When my family later moved to the city, it was a stark contrast to the world that I knew. My mother is of Cherokee descent, and my stepfather was also Native American, so valuing harmony with the natural world was often part of our family conversations.

As kids, we were made to read several books by survivalist Tom Brown Jr., such as The Tracker, which detailed an incredibly dark and seemingly realistic vision of the future.

Another important influence was Walkabout, directed by Nicolas Roeg, one of the first films I ever saw. Under the pretense of a picnic, a city man takes his two children into the wild and attempts to kill them and then kill himself. The children are saved by an Aboriginal boy who teaches them how to survive in nature. The movie focuses on the disharmony between the unbuilt world and the dangers of modernity. This theme has been central to my practice from the very beginning, in a way, a burden I cannot escape.

At the same time, my alcoholic mother had a severe religious “psychosis” and was constantly discussing the rapture, her god and the end of the world. I felt fear at times but was also very aware of the ironic and real impending destruction of the natural world––versus my mother’s imagined doom where I would be left behind.

Why is this show important for you to mount right now?

With so much suffering in the world and all the overwhelming conflicts, I am interested in their primary sources. Humans are flawed and we have never evolved past the desire to conquer and destroy.

Our world is rapidly changing. I was interested in creating an immersive experience with a macabre, humorous tone where the audience can actively engage with the themes of the work—and possibly participate in the critical thinking process. 

Tell me a little about this format and how the show came together.

I wanted to show this series of paintings, Your Ass is Grass, in a more compact space to emphasize their value as an approaching storm, so to speak, and provide a sense of urgency. In the space, audiences are surrounded by one hundred small oil paintings with a bed of real grass below their feet dying over the course of the exhibition. The audience is invited to lounge and play the R.I.P. centerpiece with recently extinct animal chessmen cast in bronze on an oversized board of faux fur. A small army of intently forward-looking frogs serve as pawns and reference the current extinction of half the world’s amphibians. So, players can knock their enemies to the ground but they’re being intently watched—maybe even judged—by paintings of endangered birds, erotic dancers and collaged portraits of other figures that are part human, part animal, part ashtray.

What state do you think we’re approaching today?

I believe the world is one big crime scene and we’re all personally involved. I think a lot about when we become consciously aware that humanity can quickly and intentionally cause the extinction of another species, which we did with the great auk at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. At the time, that event disproved Darwin’s theory that extinction typically happened over a long period—all because of our distinctly heinous human shenanigans. We became aware of the negative impact of our actions but continued—and continue—in this manner, nonetheless. In my sculpture, R.I.P., the great auk appears as the bishop. That bird was the first casualty of the Anthropocene-Epoch expansion.

Of course, the game of chess has shown up in just about every art medium over the ages—from the paintings of Honoré Daumier to Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey—as a charged symbol about the clever tacticians who play it. It was also the preferred game of such art luminaries as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. What does it mean to you?

Chess is a game of triumph, but triumph is a corollary of conquest. It is notably a game that the harmony-promoting Buddha refused to play. The game’s colonial history, coupled with an emphasis on dominance, finds fresh implications in our current subjugation of the natural world. When making R.I.P., I was inspired by the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman and Rachel Whiteread, as well as soap chess boards made in prisons.

“Everything is Sacred, Nothing is Precious; Everything is Precious, Nothing is Sacred” is at Make Room in Los Angeles through August 3.