Mythical memories, matriarchal mysteries and messages too old for written history are appropriated and translocated from prehistorical communities to the post-modern studio of artist Glen Rogers. Printmaker, painter and sculptor Rogers was born and reared in Mississippi and currently lives and works in Oakland, California. She also maintains a studio in Mazatlán, Mexico. Through the work presented in this exhibition and publication, Form & Spirit, Rogers expresses an affinity with the ancient archaeological sites of France, Greece, Ireland and Mexico. She is particularly drawn to the iconography and perceived symbology found on time-weathered walls of Neolithic caves as well as boulders and petroglyphs found on a deserted beach in La Labráda, Mexico.
Rogers' work is informed by feminist ideology, strengthened by a reverence for Mother Earth and advanced by Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Rogers subscribes to Jung's conviction that we share a common and inborn unconscious life that is evidenced in a commonality of dreams, fantasies and mythologies found in archetypal images and symbols.
These various inspirations and influences are materialized in complex work that sonically and structurally lies somewhere between a somber Gregorian chant and the Celtic tonal simplicity of an Enya ballad. Like the medieval chants, Rogers' art is full of dark tones that are relieved by suffusions of golden glowing color. Her work shares a complex layering with both the chants and with the sampler choir synthesizers of Enya. Within these aural and visual arts are simple patterns and simple symbols that repeat until they replicate and modulate into echoes of past and pre-past expressions.
To emulate the surfaces of cave walls and rocks in her paintings, Rogers primes and prepares the wood or canvas support by first laying a foundation of modeling paste. After brushing on a membrane of gesso, she applies paint-yellow, ocher, black, umber and sienna. Working subtractively and negatively in the mode of printmaking, Rogers builds a surface that has the mystery and complexity of an archaeological dig. She allows the marks and scratches (natural or manufactured) to lead her to the symbol or anthropomorphic evidence she pursues. "I work from the sides," Rogers explains, "and at some point a symbol emerges. I follow it." Very often, Rogers will apply a wash or glaze over the work to add textural interest and to give it a finished surface.
Charcoal drawings, portraying the cyclic ceremony of the phases of the moon, continue the repetitive rhythm of her paintings. Like many of the works in the exhibition, the drawings were executed during her residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico and are inspired by Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, who personifies love and compassion. Lotus, a monotype with drypoint series, also relates to her painting style. Here, she gouges and manipulates the plates to add surface interest and texture and to give the pieces an organic sense of space.
All of Rogers' work has a feminist sensibility, of which her series of copper sculptures, Ritual Vessels, is the most overt manifestation. The shape and imagery of the vessels are materializations of the life-giving female power. The vessels and the spiral elements are visual expressions of the metaphysical principle concerning the interdependence and interconnectedness of all things. Therefore, the vessels serve as sacred icons with the potential to resurrect the layers of consciousness in which our more primordial images and our true origins lie dormant. The round, infinite shape of the vessels and the symbols etched into the surface relate the constant flux of regeneration. Rogers' womb-like vessels enclose a mythic memory of a time when Mother Earth was understood to be a living being and where the separation of animate and inanimate did not exist-a time of a more expanded consciousness.
Art was born at the moment someone first used a sharpened stone or scrubbed a lump of clay onto the surface of a cave wall to create an image. More than magic, more than spiritual ritual, and more than utilitarian performance, the impetus for cave painting was to share a life experience-an impulse we now call art. Art transforms us, humanizes us, reveals our feelings to us, delivers us from darkness (or into it) and shatters solitude by providing a way to communicate with others. Art survives the societies which created it; indeed, it develops the spiritual potential of a society. For these reasons and more, we are indebted to Glen Rogers for sharing her art- art that is a profound form of primal meditation, a multi-sensory experience.
April 2002