Your Ass Is Grass, 2020

“Your Ass is Grass” series, Fawn Rogers, 2020 ultraviolet ink on mirror, 48” x 96”

Your Ass is Grass

Reflecting, both literally and figuratively, a narrative of anthropogenic climate change, Your Ass Is Grass traces socio-ecological events with perspicacity and playfulness. The series is comprised of brightly colored, multi-layered paintings on mirror. Combining spectrums of colors in horizontal gradients with what Rogers calls an obscured peripheral shadow, visible only upon an angled view, the series conflates text as image to powerful effect.

The multiple expressions in the series,Your Ass Is Grass, Sunny Day Floods, Polar Vortex, Iceberg, and Woolly Mammoth, each indicate a different phenomenon and a recent introduction to the common vernacular. The first and eponymous work offers a tongue-in-cheek reference to environmental impact as mutually assured destruction, while Sunny Day Floods references the wild sea level fluctuations experienced in Florida, causing city streets to flood on perfectly sunny days. Popularized by bizarre winter weather patterns in Chicago, Polar Vortex invokes the violent storm systems exacerbated by global temperature shifts, and Iceberg offers a companion piece, bringing to mind both dissolving floes and massive hazards of disruption, like furniture discarded on the side of the road. Lastly, Woolly Mammoth is fraught with radical implications, conjuring not only the majestic and famously extinct creature, but also cloning technologies’ current efforts to raise it from the dead before the ice in the Arctic fully melts.

As is true throughout Rogers’s oeuvre, ecological themes are treated with dark humor, accounting for an expansive view of nature and industry. This is perhaps most salient in Rogers’s video art, such as X: A Value Not Yet Known and The World Is Your Oyster, but also perceptible in the sumptuous, circular aesthetics of Yes Yes It Is Burning Me. Rogers’s predilection for second-person present tense underscores the impression that the viewer is complicit. Each in its own way, Rogers’s paintings and installations seem poised to disturb and delight, inviting the viewer into the pleasure/pain of [dis]comfort.

Prizing dimensionality and play, Your Ass Is Grass shares a kindred spirit with Doug Aitken’s text sculptures, as well as the literally electric text art of Tracey Emin. There’s also a streak of the dark humor found in Ed Ruscha’s text paintings, a tonally apt approach to themes ranging from resuscitating the long-extinct mammoth to surviving our own human-induced environmental disasters. Confronted with bold, blinding text directly at eye level, the viewer can’t help but feel implicated by the message: Your Ass Is Grass. —A. Miller