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Barbara Rogers: Garden of Feminine Reason
Oskar Friedl Gallery When most people experience a garden or wilderness, they see big trees, some weeds, and dirt. They rarely examine the meaning or purpose of a garden, although they may see the beauty of it. Landscape designers often don't explore the complexities of botanica, hence there are beautifully designed gardens, but fewer botanical gardens. Horticulture is the study or science of cultivation of plants, and botany is the study of the plants themselves. Usually, if someone is interested in one, they also have a certain degree of interest in the other. Barbara Rogers is no exception, and her new canvases and paintings at Oskar Friedl Gallery are like beautifully designed botanical gardens.
The immediate impression of Barbara Rogers' work is the fantastical and decorative use of botanical imagery. Seed pods, leafs, stems, flower parts enlarged a thousand-times-plus are painted, some in detail, and some in stenciled shape only, in multiple layers and colored backgrounds. Somewhere in between Bosch and O'Keefe, Rogers finds a scientific as well as aesthetic interest in real botanical specimens. Combining some of the shapes or outlines of parts of plants she finds around her Arizona home and studio, Rogers examines each and applies a philosophical interpretation to them. Unlike Bosch, there are no moralizing, representations of biblical parables or pulpit sermons, but Rogers does utilize the subconscious to add whimsy or mystery to her work in a similar fashion. Like Bosch and other late medieval and early Renaissance painters, there is an interest in the imagery -- here, strictly of the garden -- as a philosophical vehicle for the meaning of life. When someone does stop and stare in a garden or landscape, and begins to contemplate in zen-like fashion the meaning of life and death, or birth and rebirth, the objects of contemplation are directly related to the subject. We cannot ignore that the materials we are looking at are or were living at one time, maybe parts of a whole. Is a plant a community or a unique entity? How does its propagation affect it as an entity? At what point does the entity die, or do we say that it has given birth? We may then attempt to reinterpret our findings in terms of humans for another level of complexity.
I think that Rogers's titling of her work begins to allude to this discussion she is having in her personal contemplation of her specimens. Rogers has titled all but two of the works in this show "Garden of Feminine Reason." This is interpreted by me, the viewer, that this work should be viewed in the whole rather in parts: each piece in this show would be like a panel in a large "Garden." -- Which makes sense. Seeing these works in a gallery, one could make an entire environment out of them -- including the two paintings titled "Dreampond" -- the water feature of a very elaborately structured Garden. The "Reason" is easily discernable from a consistent examination of garden specimens. The "Feminine" from the specific attention paid to birth and rebirth and seed pod imagery. Flowers and flower structure also appear in the paintings, however, flowers can be male or female, and male and female -- depending on the species. Sadly, I don't believe that the paintings are meant to stay together as a group piece, but that the artist simply failed to give each painting a separate title. Some elements of Rogers's work take on sinister tones, some are simply decorative and some are purely adding a human order to an otherwise unorderly shape. In Garden of Feminine Reason #13, for example, there are numerous seed pods, pollen shapes, tendrils scrolling in a multi-layered patterned background. In the foreground are more seed pods that are almost insect-like, floating as if in a primordial soup, looking like they're going to burst at any second, releasing their contents. -- Or perhaps they already have burst and we're looking at the final remains of that action, and now it simply drifts before it decays to provide further nutrients to the life it just dispersed. In Garden of Feminine Reason #11, a large 6 foot by 50 inch canvas, reason seems to have escaped us entirely. Oversized Lunaria pod shells are placed in a chain on the side of the canvas while a completely fantasized seed pod with "seed wings" flies into the scene and dark, mysterious teardrop seed shapes await.
Rogers's work undoubtedly is very decorative and appealing. On first look, the paintings are particularly appealing. They suffer slightly on close examination when some stenciling becomes apparent. Then as we become more aware and with further study, we see the layers of painting underneath and that there is more here, in fact, than meets the eye. Aestheticism is finding its way back into Contemporary American painting and Barbara Rogers has certainly found her style, technique and subject in which to work. Barbara Rogers comes to Oskar Friedl Gallery from a strong career in Arizona where she currently teaches at the University of Arizona. Rogers' previously had a one-woman show at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art which produced a catalog available at Oskar Friedl's. It contains a wonderful introduction by Gina Cavallo Collins, and an essay by Paul Eli Ivey. Rogers's work has been reviewed in many respected magazines and newspapers (and now this one). She has had numerous exhibitions elsewhere, but more recently in Chicago, she took part in the Buddha Show last October, also at Oskar Friedl. This show will be on display through April 28. --Richard Donagrandi Richard Donagrandi is the Executive Producer of ArtScope.net. He is also a working artist with a BFA from Michigan State University, and is currently sharing a studio space in the Flat Iron Arts Building in Chicago. |
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