Bunny Rogers

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Bunny Rogers (* 1990 in Houston , Texas ) is an American artist .

life and work

Rogers was born in Houston, Texas, in 1990. She grew up in New Jersey , Texas and Long Island , New York State . After graduating from the Parsons School of Design in New York City in 2012, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm in 2017 . In the 2018/2019 winter semester, she taught as a visiting professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main .

Her work includes sculptures, installations , images, videos, publications, and 3D modeling. She also gives performance presentations and poetry readings. In her works she mainly deals with topics such as fears, trauma, death, grief and memories. Rogers is open about the fact that she has suffered from depression since her early youth and uses her experiences with the disease in her art. She also finds inspiration in characters from video games and television series.

For her first installation Sister Unn’s (2011–2012, in collaboration with Filip Olszewski), Rogers rented an empty flower shop in Forest Hills for six months , in which she set up roses painted black, which passers-by through the shop window and internet users can access via an additional website Could watch wither. With Petrified Stump (2014) she contributed to the 2015 book The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present by Shumon Basar , Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist . In her work, Study for Portrait Joan (2016), consisting of five digital photographs, they portrayed themselves as "Joan of Arc", a character from the MTV - cartoon series Clone High (2002-2003), which is as a Teenage reincarnated clone of Joan of Arc . The work was exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2018 .

Her best-known works include the installations Columbine Library (2014) and Columbine Cafeteria (2016), which, together with her first solo exhibition Brig Und Ladder ( Whitney Museum of American Art , 2017), form a trilogy addressing the Littleton School Massacre (1999) . For the three-part work, she reconstructed the library, the school cafeteria and the auditorium of Columbine High School . The works of the trilogy on display include three swivel chairs with bullet holes in the upholstery, from which foam protrudes, as well as the sculpture Clone State Bookcase (2014), which forms the centerpiece of Columbine Library . It consists of a bookshelf, black ribbons and several plush dolls that are said to represent caricatures of the late musician Elliott Smith . The sculpture was inspired by the controversial “ Columbiners ” fan base , which formed on the Internet around the two perpetrators of the rampage. Rogers pursues the obsession of this online community by merging the seemingly innocent with the sinister in Clone State Bookcase .

In 2017 the work Mandy's Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria , which is part of the Columbine trilogy, was shown at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The installation consists of a video in which an animated female figure sits at a piano and a real piano that stands in front of the projection screen. The character in the video is based on a cartoon character from Clone High who was voiced by Mandy Moore .

The title of her exhibition Pectus excavatum ( Museum für Moderne Kunst , 2019) is inspired by Rogers' slightly pronounced funnel breast (Latin: pectus excavatum ). The works in the exhibition included the silicone sculpture of a roughly nine-meter-long giant squid with ten grasping arms, two mandalas with motifs of rabbits arranged in a circle and a machine-cooled, colored-illuminated iceberg entitled “Mount Olympia”, which visitors were allowed to touch.

Her largest exhibition to date, entitled Kind Kingdom, opened in January 2020 at the Kunsthaus Bregenz . In her exhibits spread over four floors, Rogers deals with the phases that people go through after the death of a loved one.

Rogers lives in New York City.

reception

Rogers is referred to in the media as the “shooting star” and “ enfant terrible ” of the art world. Critics compared her to Anne Imhof , Ian Cheng and Ryan Trecartin .

The Village Voice judged Rogers 'Columbine trilogy: "[...] Rogers is masterful at mood-setting, and one can still [...] feel her objects' palpable ache, even without knowing the stories behind them." ("[...] Rogers is a master at creating moods, you can [...] still feel the palpable pain of her objects, even without knowing the stories behind them.")

Erhard Metz wrote about her: “Bunny Roger's art is undoubtedly autobiographical - she hardly seems to be able to imagine another. Your artistic truth is a very personal one, perhaps also an escapist one . But the authenticity of the power of this art is conveyed in an almost suggestive way to the viewer who opens up to it. "

Annett Göthe comments on Rogers' work: "Growing up with numerous avatars in online communities, the artist, who has now exhibited internationally, creates works that explore our understanding of isolation and belonging and repeatedly focus on the topic of collective memories and feelings."

Zoma Crum-Tefsa wrote about Rogers for Interview magazine : “[She has the] ability to pull apart the symbolism of death, and in turn, make it less shocking. Like the mythological sea creatures that populate Roger's [sic] imagination, gruesomeness is often so shrouded in sensationalism that it loses its outline. Yet in her work, the macabre takes on a type of optimistic monumentality. " ("[She has the] ability to pull apart the symbolism of death and in turn make it less shocking. Like the mythological sea creatures that populate Rogers' imagination, cruelty is often so engulfed in sensationalism that it loses its contours in her work the macabre assumes a kind of optimistic monumentality. ")

In the booklet accompanying the exhibition Pectus excavatum it says about Rogers' art: "The real is constituted in the permanent intersection with the symbolic and the imaginary."

Works of art (selection)

  • 2014: Poetry Reading with clone of Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) in Columbine Library (video)
  • 2014: Poetry Reading with Gazlene Membrane in Columbine Cafeteria (Video)
  • 2014: Clone State Bookcase (sculpture)
  • 2014: Petrified Stump (sculpture)
  • 2016: Mandy's Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (Video)
  • 2016: Study for Joan Portrait (digital photographs)
  • 2017: Being There
  • 2019: Ouroboros Fence (sculpture)
  • 2019: Creepy Crawlers / Giant Squid (sculpture)
  • 2019: Mount Olympia (sculpture)
  • 2019: Three Hares Mandala (Red Hell / Blue Hell)
  • 2019: Flames of Hell fan (Red, Blue)
  • 2019: Self-portrait as a clone of Jeanne d'Arc

Exhibitions (selection)

Rogers' works have been exhibited in the following locations, among others:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Hierholzer: The deep sea as a retreat for the imagination. In: faz.net. January 26, 2019, accessed January 18, 2020.
  2. ↑ Bunny Rogers artist portrait on the website of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, accessed on January 19, 2020.
  3. ↑ a b c d Erhard Metz: Mythically charged place. In: FeuilletonFrankfurt. The magazine for art, culture & lifestyle. Retrieved January 18, 2020.
  4. ↑ a b c Felix von Boehm: "I am a depressive optimist." In: monopoly. Magazine for art and life. January 15, 2020, accessed January 18, 2020.
  5. ↑ a b c Hannah Stamler: Bunny Rogers Explores Columbine Through Her Own Private Cosmology. In: The Village Voice. August 2, 2017, accessed January 18, 2020.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Annett Göthe: “Art needs more freaks.” P. 3 of the FAZ supplement of the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm from January 19, 2019, PDF, accessed on January 18, 2020.
  7. ^ A b Elisabeth Sherman, Margaret Kross: Remnants and Remembrance. Whitney.org, accessed January 19, 2020.
  8. ↑ Iceberg ahead. In: SZ.de. March 1, 2019, accessed January 18, 2020.
  9. ↑ a b Caroline Goldstein: Processing Trauma: Artist Bunny Rogers on Using Her Work to Explore the Columbine Massacre's Lingering Impact. In: artnet . August 9, 2017, accessed January 18, 2020.
  10. ↑ Donna Schons: Bunny Rogers: On the Unsettling Obsessions of Youth. In: Sleek Magazine. May 18, 2017, accessed January 19, 2020.
  11. ^ The artist Bunny Rogers. New exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. zdf.de, January 17, 2020, accessed on January 18, 2020.
    KUB presents program for 2020. Vorarlberg.orf.at. November 14, 2019, accessed January 18, 2020.
  12. ^ Joseph R. Wolin: Bunny in the Headlights. In: Vice. July 21, 2017, accessed January 18, 2020.
  13. ↑ Zoma Crum-TEFSA: THE ARTIST IS MAKING THE BUNNY ROGERS MACABRE OPTIMISTIC. In: Interview. March 20, 2019, accessed January 18, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Rogers, bunny
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1990
PLACE OF BIRTH Houston , Texas