Room With A View, 2020

Room With A View

With vibrance and subtlety, a series of paintings by artist Fawn Rogers explores the interplay between presence and absence, obsolescence and isolation, evolution and extinction.

Oil on canvas with vivid monochromatic backgrounds, each painting highlights the grotto chair, a potent symbol of both human invention and the natural world. Fabricated in Venice, a city whose gradual descent into the sea is itself a reminder of the transience of human civilization, the chairs appear as both lonely and luxuriant, a recollection of the chair’s history as reserved for royalty. In a remarkable progression from obscurity to ubiquity, the chair is rarely mentioned in antiquarian texts, the Bible makes no reference to chairs, despite copious references to thrones, and Shakespeare utilizes the chair predominantly as a symbol for royal claims and personages. Instated as an object of opulence in ancient Egypt, the chair surged in production and use during the 18th and 19th centuries, a shift reflected in literature and exemplified by the shell-inspired aesthetics of Rococo design in the 1700s.

With aesthetics that bridge the sculpturally ornate and the darkly cadaverous, Room With A View recalls the structured, high-contrast photographs of Ruth Bernhard, including such works as Shell in Silk and Banded Murex Deep Sea Scallop and Muschel (Shell), by Katharina Fritsch. Both visually and historically, there is a spectral dynamic to the beauty of an empty shell. The scallop shell serves as a symbol of rebirth in Christianity, as well as a pre-Christian Celtic symbol of death. In the 19th century, Oliver Wendell Holmes identified the empty shell as a symbol of the human soul passing into eternal life. This interstitial space between life and death is reinforced by the natural habitat of the seashell: a setting that is perpetually suspended between water and land, wilderness and civilization.

Inspired by the scallop, the grotto chair makes an appearance in several of Rogers’ works, including The World Is Your Oyster and the GODOG series. In these works, mollusks and their shells recurrently emblemize the diverse conflicts and collusions among nature and industry.

Etymologically, the root of scallop derives from *skel-, meaning to cut. In a significant twist of meaning, this linguistic heritage is shared with both skeleton and sculpture, things at once powerful and delicate, the height of nature and art, and destined to outlast the bodies and cultures they inhabit. An empty scallop shell once contained, and was created by, the life inside it. Likewise, the empty grotto chair captures the height of beauty and creation, as well as their inevitable loss.

In its melancholic depiction of a single empty chair, and an aesthetic tendency toward rich textures and amorphous lines, the work calls to mind Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale Chairs, Qing dynasty wooden chairs which raise questions regarding identity, memory, love, dreams and the possibility of cultural dialogue. Van Gogh’s paintings Gauguin’s Chair and Vincent’s Chair, conveying both humanity and profoundly felt absence. In Rogers’ depictions, the chair often appears as both exquisite and forlorn, a balance underscored by the hauntingly repetitive dynamic of the series. Redolent of the mass production of chairs during the Industrial Revolution, this repetition also conjures the dreamlike, elegiac contrasts present in Andy Warhol’s Shadows series.

Despite the visual absence of human figures, the element of humanity is deeply conveyed in absentia. Rogers’ notes: “Viewers have expressed a visceral longing to see someone in the chair. The absence of a human figure creates a question, a sense of incompletion and speculation.” With an approach both historically grounded and keenly prescient, Room With A View offers a meditation on opulence and fragility, ubiquity and seclusion: creation and curation as human artifact. —Amanda Miller