Jessica Rohrer "Oak Ridge Road"
P.P.O.W.
This event has ended.
Oakridge Road is comprised of 24 new paintings depicting interior settings, cropped details, and window views of domestic suburban life derived from Rohrer’s immediate surroundings. Complementing the paintings are a series of works on paper featuring portrait-like renderings of everyday household products isolated on stark white grounds.
The subject matter and scale of Rohrer’s new work lies in palpable contrast to the intimacy it implies. Rohrer employs elements of hyper-realism combined with careful manipulation of the scenes, emptying the works of the detritus of actual living to create sanitized, idealized depictions.
Referencing photographers such as Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall, and Stan Douglas, Rohrer’s precisely staged and meticulously painted vignettes eerily balance that which is omitted and that which is rendered in painstaking detail. The flattening of space and absence of time or atmosphere brings an abstract quality to the work, with the subtle presence of the artist’s hand further complicating the reading. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space:
“Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life... Like us, through us and for us they have a quality of intimacy…”
With Oakridge Road, Rohrer delves into issues of personal and cultural identity by delivering inferred conclusions about a person based on a deceptively complex interpretation of mundane, daily life.
Jessica Rohrer received her M.F.A. in painting from the Yale University School of Art.
Media
Schedule
from June 23, 2011 to July 23, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-06-23 from 18:00 to 20:00