(prior page) Untitled, 2012 Oil on linen, 60x48 in. Courtesy the artist Untitled, 2012 Oil on linen, 60x48 in. Courtesy the artist Untitled, 2012 Oil on linen, 60x48 in. Courtesy the artist (prior page) Untitled, 2012 Oil on linen, 60x48 in. Courtesy the artist
Chris Lux: Your new abstract works and new portraiture works I saw in your studio the other day seem like big departures. That said, they still use a language that is present in your older paintings. Almost like the figurative elements and the abstract elements of your past work have separated and demanded your full attention. How did you get to these paintings? Clare Rojas: Here is an appropriate narrative from, ‘The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron’ that seems to sum it up for me. There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. CL: How important do you feel it is for artists at every stage in their career to be able to follow new paths and reinvent themselves? Phillip Guston’s infamous 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery has always served as big inspiration for me. He was shunned after that show because it marked a change in his work, from abstract expressionism into more figurative approach. Your new work seems much less of a departure, but still a change. Do you ever feel like change in artist’s practice can be extremely difficult? CR: How could someone’s lifetime not change their work or their practice? How could the arch of time not change your perspective, your influence, your growth and personal truth? I don’t know that it’s possible for change to NOT be reflected in your work. Change is the only thing one can do. I also think most respectable galleries, support the artist no matter what manifests in their work, and if they don’t support the artists then they usually they part ways. I think that is true for any relationship. I also think that people just miss what they don’t have anymore...and if someone stops making something you like, one feels loss. CL: From the sheer size of your work, to performing music on stage, not to mention the “controversial” naked men paintings, I must say you don’t seem to be afraid of much in your practice. You seem so comfortable following your way. Have you always been able to feel so comfortable? Was there anyone or work that you remember really strengthening your drive? CR: I think at a very early age I had a sense that what my friends were feeling, a carefree, experimental, innocence, I was not feeling. I had more feelings of protection, anger and frustration, and knowledge of a darker harsher reality. As I grew up into my late 20s, I watched people a lot. I was very quiet. My personal library expanded and I read a lot of feminist literature. I had a motivation that was about survival, and trying my best to protect myself from being shut up, let down, and objectified. Being angry is very powerful, fear, also, to say the least, can be powerful. I feel like for a brief moment in my career I was able to harness those emotions and use them for good. But for now, I feel like the woman about to be eaten by the tigers, I fought a good fight, the outcome, meaning death, is inevitable. I might as well enjoy the strawberries. The body of work that you refer to as “naked men” was a very
interesting experiment for me and I learned a lot. This idea manifested out of the animation called “the manipulators” where I collaborated with Andrew Jeffery Wright while living in Philly. We animated fashion magazines, in a very juvenile funny way, and this satirical laughter was one remedy to breaking the spell these images had on women and men. It was fun to take their power away by just simply making someone fart. All of a sudden you were not looking at a complex advertisement that embodied manipulation and consumption or a model selling perfume half naked and starving. You were laughing at a massive animated fart explosion coming from her bum. My politics were in place, and I took it further in these paintings of just naked men. I basically wanted to see what it felt like to see all the ads of women in submissive stupid degrading positions plastered on buses, billboards, TV ads, magazines, all men, naked in those positions. Would it be socially acceptable then? Would I think less of men? The problem was, the majority of men’s vulnerability did not lie in their bodies, like it does for women. A silly drawing of them naked, is not going to take away the fact that men run our country, are the majority on the supreme court, get paid 30% more than women. It was like fighting fire with a flower. I found most women didn’t really want to wear the t-shirts I made out of these drawings, they didn’t find my humor that funny, and if they did, it was a select few, maybe women felt empathy, maybe the pain goes so deep that it doesn’t matter who is in the image, what is reflected is the same. I was even told to try drawing from porn by a professor in graduate school. But this is the entire point - this wasn’t derived from porn, from an extreme, this wasn’t about sex. This was about sexuality, what it means to be a female human, or male human, a pornified mainstream, every-minute-of-everyday bombardment, brainwashing, social conditioning. It was a trivial response. But at least it was a response. The conversation CAN NOT BE ONE-SIDED and it felt that way to me. Men got a kick out of it. Not one man I knew was offended by these images. Yet when I saw a man wearing some stupid t-shirt of some topless woman peeing, wasted, or something, and yes I have seen this, I am traumatized. I feel physical pain, and hurt and sadness. I can’t understand why they would want to engage in that violent display of objectification, even if she is doing it to her self. Did they feel this was a great way to define masculinity? I made myself laugh, that was it, and at the time, I needed to laugh or I was constantly crying. Performance, Peggy (Honeywell - Rojas’ stage name), a stage, it was a challenge for me, still is. But the idea, the visual, of a woman in a world she created on her terms, full of women who fight, are warriors, support each other and have the entire wisdom of the women who came before them, standing alone, singing narratives about pain, loss, love, resilience. That was power. I wanted to own my world. I was going to stand and sing because I was fortunate enough to have a voice for us all, and I wasn’t going to take any of that for granted. CL: Narrative has been a big a part of your work for a long time. From the narrative paintings, to your music career, writing and story telling seem to be a driving force in all your work. It feels like with this new work maybe you have become the protagonist now? Can you talk about how narrative has and continues to influence you and how that factors into your abstract works? CR: I have always been attracted to narrative. I love all forms. Everything is a story. Somewhere along the way, I developed a coping mechanism that helped
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