Essay by Nicole Miller
Coalescing the visceral and ephemeral, violent and sensual, The World Is Your Oyster offers a provocative meditation on totality, [d]evolution, and the Anthropocene. Presented in two-channel video, the work explores various manifestations of the oyster and other mollusks—life, harvest, cultivation, consumption—against a visual/aural dynamic at once discordant and hypnotic. Contraposing the multi-layered, precious, and luminescent pearl with slicing, shucking, prodding, extraction, and torrents of colorless blood, the project is, like its subject, at once lurid and intimate, vividly organic and exquisitely orchestrated.
In both concept and execution, this work engages with the artist’s GODOG series, most notably the Pussy Buddha. At the onset, she appears both on screen and facing a screen, straddling a patch of shoreline riddled with shells. In this interstitial space between ocean and land, artificiality and nature, she observes the surgical insertion/manipulation of oysters to create pearls. Both voyeur and voyeurized, she mediates between the viewer and image, serving as both spectator and gateway into a profusion of lusciously juxtaposed footage.
Alive with connotations of sensuality, sanctity, and invasion, the oyster has long been associated with the erotic. Works of art from Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus to Steen’s The Oyster Eater portray the oyster as a symbol of lust, pleasure, opulence, and indulgence. Traditionally evocative of the feminine, oysters are naturally protandric, or sequentially hermaphroditic, shifting gender from male to female over the course of their lives. This fluidity underscores a more evolved conceptualization of gender and nature, with nuanced implications for the pearl’s status as a symbol of divinity and transcendence.
Emblemizing purity, fertility and hidden or sacred knowledge, the commercial pith of the oyster, the pearl, has been harvested and cultivated for millennia. Despite being a symbol of incorruptibility, the pearl’s inception hinges on corruption: the introduction of an irritant inside the oyster. In the video the invading object is a plastic sphere manually inserted into the body of the mollusk to create the perfect pearl. This element of intrusion—and the collision of idolatry and industry—mirrors the history of cultivation, exploitation and consumption. An image of both sex and death, oysters are both an aphrodisiac and carriers of Vibrio vulnificus, the world’s most deadly seafood-borne pathogen, killing one in five of those afflicted. Holding these elements in tension, The World Is Your Oyster calls to mind the explicit contrast of luxurious excess and bleak commoditization in Mika Rottenberg’s NoNoseKnows, but veers toward implicating the viewer in the pleasure and violence of consumption.
Bookending the Pussy Buddha’s immanence/transcendence, the video concludes with side-by-side footage of a perfect, symmetrically reflected golden pearl and the plunder of the ocean floor. This final juxtaposition recalls Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych, in which birth and death are laterally positioned, mediated by a suspended, floating human in an interstitial void. Here, likewise, the viewer of The World Is Your Oyster finds herself: suspended between perfection and annihilation, creation and destruction.
As conflictual as it is compelling, The World Is Your Oyster is ultimately a work of excision, at once violating and seductive, ravishing in all senses, all-consuming and offered up for consumption. At the center of these contradictions, the viewer is present as a literal embodiment of the anthropocentric. Whether transfixed, revulsed, or seduced, the viewer’s experience is inevitably one of implication, engagement, and complicity. The world is, after all, your oyster.
“The World is Your Oyster”, Two Channel Video, Fawn Rogers, 2020
Coalescing the visceral and ephemeral, violent and sensual, The World Is Your Oyster offers a provocative meditation on totality, [d]evolution, and the Anthropocene. Presented in two-channel video, the work explores various manifestations of the oyster and other mollusks—life, harvest, cultivation, consumption—against a visual/aural dynamic at once discordant and hypnotic. Contraposing the multi-layered, precious, and luminescent pearl with slicing, shucking, prodding, extraction, and torrents of colorless blood, the project is, like its subject, at once lurid and intimate, vividly organic and exquisitely orchestrated.
In both concept and execution, this work engages with the artist’s GODOG series, most notably the Pussy Buddha. At the onset, she appears both on screen and facing a screen, straddling a patch of shoreline riddled with shells. In this interstitial space between ocean and land, artificiality and nature, she observes the surgical insertion/manipulation of oysters to create pearls. Both voyeur and voyeurized, she mediates between the viewer and image, serving as both spectator and gateway into a profusion of lusciously juxtaposed footage.
Alive with connotations of sensuality, sanctity, and invasion, the oyster has long been associated with the erotic. Works of art from Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus to Steen’s The Oyster Eater portray the oyster as a symbol of lust, pleasure, opulence, and indulgence. Traditionally evocative of the feminine, oysters are naturally protandric, or sequentially hermaphroditic, shifting gender from male to female over the course of their lives. This fluidity underscores a more evolved conceptualization of gender and nature, with nuanced implications for the pearl’s status as a symbol of divinity and transcendence.
Emblemizing purity, fertility and hidden or sacred knowledge, the commercial pith of the oyster, the pearl, has been harvested and cultivated for millennia. Despite being a symbol of incorruptibility, the pearl’s inception hinges on corruption: the introduction of an irritant inside the oyster. In the video the invading object is a plastic sphere manually inserted into the body of the mollusk to create the perfect pearl. This element of intrusion—and the collision of idolatry and industry—mirrors the history of cultivation, exploitation and consumption. An image of both sex and death, oysters are both an aphrodisiac and carriers of Vibrio vulnificus, the world’s most deadly seafood-borne pathogen, killing one in five of those afflicted. Holding these elements in tension, The World Is Your Oyster calls to mind the explicit contrast of luxurious excess and bleak commoditization in Mika Rottenberg’s NoNoseKnows, but veers toward implicating the viewer in the pleasure and violence of consumption.
Bookending the Pussy Buddha’s immanence/transcendence, the video concludes with side-by-side footage of a perfect, symmetrically reflected golden pearl and the plunder of the ocean floor. This final juxtaposition recalls Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych, in which birth and death are laterally positioned, mediated by a suspended, floating human in an interstitial void. Here, likewise, the viewer of The World Is Your Oyster finds herself: suspended between perfection and annihilation, creation and destruction.
As conflictual as it is compelling, The World Is Your Oyster is ultimately a work of excision, at once violating and seductive, ravishing in all senses, all-consuming and offered up for consumption. At the center of these contradictions, the viewer is present as a literal embodiment of the anthropocentric. Whether transfixed, revulsed, or seduced, the viewer’s experience is inevitably one of implication, engagement, and complicity. The world is, after all, your oyster.
Essay by Nancy Meyer
Filmed in a variety of locations on Hydra Island, Greece, Yes, Yes It Is Burning Me is a Two Channel Video installation exploring humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. The title of the installation is a response to the questions posed by a monk at a local monastery: “Is the stone warm from the sun? Can you feel it? Do you like it? Does it go all the way down your body as you hold it?” Combining rich visual elements and natural sounds recorded on the island, Yes, Yes It Is Burning me centers on the conveyance of rocks, a representation of all matter, as a symbolic focal point.
Through a series of symbolically lush vignettes, the viewer observes the repetitive movement of stones. These objects take on a variety of interpretations, spanning a diverse spectrum of contexts and human interactions. The visceral narrative journeys through towns, farms, beaches, a boat graveyard, a monastery, a casino, and the Deste Foundation’s Slaughterhouse project space. From strangers and local villagers to the artist herself, the video’s human participants exist within an unidentifiable moment in time, illustrating a universal preoccupation with purpose, meaning, and motion detached from progress.
The video begins with a naked woman, Rogers herself, walking with a horse and baby mule. Ostensibly indicative of freedom and innocence, the harmonious scene is disrupted by the harsh, gradually revealed reality of them walking on a bed of trash against a backdrop of abandoned boats. In a more contemporary setting, Rogers is observed sleeping, intercut with footage of an abused donkey eating thorns and stones as a man wearing a saddle walks behind. Linking these scenes, images of
subjugation and entropy are juxtaposed with moments of the artist meditatively, repetitively stacking rocks.
In a later time-lapsed scene, spanning the day’s course from sunrise to sundown, a local monk appears holding a rock. In a disturbingly charged hybrid of indecency and intimacy, the monk slides the rock up and down over the body of the artist as she lies on the ground. During this discomfiting, spontaneous moment of candid molestation—endured but unprompted by the artist—the monk poses the series of questions presaging the work’s title. In a local casino, the same rock is held by a series of individuals, each with a distinct sensation of its heft and import.
Ultimately, the Two Channel Video concludes in a state of play. Clad in a youthful yet danger- redolent yellow, Rogers stacks, throws, and arranges rocks with numbness or bliss, a monotony that recalls Camus’s reinterpretation of the ancient Greek myth: an image of Sisyphus smiling.
Essay by Stefano di Paola
Rogers’ X: A Value Not Yet Known begins with a rhythmic waltz, as a camera pans over the Arctic Sea. The ice floes with jagged edges disconnect from one another revealing the sensuous and inky black water between. The music is punctuated by the orgiastic sounds of a couple as the lens focuses unto the pure and clear blue of an iceberg— a naturally formed X shape filling the entirety of the frame. This shape is echoed in title and meaning through the film, a representation of the mathematical symbol of a something that remains unknown, something to be found. An equation is postulated. The parts are composed of a polar bear, now in unknown territory, a parade of wooly mammoths, re created for a possible future, and a golem like figure, the human, burdened by an endless river of technology and materialism represented by the silver material within which it is bound.
Throughout the video piece, Rogers connects the body with that of nature. As one hears the sound of a couple in ecstasy we are made aware, through the exquisite shots of the blue ice and dark waters, of the danger that lies within. Rogers compels us to stand firmly footed in the Anthropocene. She mixes time signatures: the human and the earth’s, engaged in a simultaneous but divergent dance.
This is not to say that Roger’s work is fundamentally an ecological proclamation, but rather the documentation of a process that is occurring at the sum of the Anthropocene. The film captures the silent cracking of the ice floe while metallic insect sounds fill the void of their breaking.
A voice echoes, “An ocean of, and an ocean of”, each falling somewhere between the What has been and what will be, the heart-wrenchingly human and the universal. “An ocean of lost hopes. An ocean without time” There is a sense that the dark waters below the ice has become the primordial ooze from which life spawns— it is the seminal fluid, the psychosexual oceanic consciousness exposed.
The voiceover continues, now female, as an omnipresent force within the video. “I love your bones, and your blood, and your bile, I love the shape of your organs, and the dark brown color of your liver...” The narration’s barely audible whispers describes the evisceration of a body, an amorous moment with the organs, the systemic qualities, its color, shapes, and power. As the body dissolves to its hidden parts through violent description, the space before the camera is connected. It is through the human interaction that the pitch-black liquid pours forth. A violence against the earth that is enacted through human interaction alone. The greed and the blatant disregard for the future is captured through the ancillary video piece Run, Run. Featuring an endless turning gilded rat wheel, it is pushed forever forward by an invisible force, an irregular rhythm. Its quick movement with the inevitable slowing, magically, effortlessly, and just shy of randomly, is soundlessly perpetuated.
Three CGIed woolly mammoths in a single military formation crossing the landscape become heroic figures. Despite being CGI representations, these mammoths are the harbingers of an inevitable conclusion. Juxtaposed with their purposeful gait is the now emaciated polar bear eating from a trashcan. The ghostly digital representations of the behemoths recall scientific efforts to combat the approaching climate disaster through the reviving of the long dead beast. Scientists posit their grazing on the Arctic tundra will expose the earth underneath to the cold air. The refreezing of the dirt beneath the vegetation is one of the planet’s last resorts to maintain the balance of the frozen poles. Earth’s future will continue through the ancient black blood of mammoths preserved below the ice.
In the last scene, an anonymous figure, golem like, unfurls and rises from the newly exposed soil. The petrichor inhaled by Rogers’ abstracted body maintains a hopeful vision. Its metallic blanketing reflects the sky above onto the ground below. The earth and cosmos collapse upon themselves, falling into symmetry. The visceral nature of our experience, the conflation of hominid and earth, and the folding of time are all wrapped within the faceless body of our future.