Born in 1990, New York City based artist Bunny Rogers serves as a case example of a millennial artist reflecting on and re-projecting her own adolescence through her practice. Her work makes use of dozens of cultural references such as cartoon characters, celebrities, and storybooks and places them under the context of real-world tragedy. She threads connections between these through investigations of subcultures and dynamics of adolescent emotional repression in the 21st century. At times opaque through her references, Rogers’ practice creates a two-way road of interaction: audience-to-artist and artist-to-audience. Bunny Rogers uses her own youth as a navigating needle to weave a memorializing skein of media’s projections on 21st century adolescent violence, alienation, and identity.
At its surface level, much of Rogers’ work operates as sculptural installation. Using professional craftsmanship of commercial furniture building, Rogers juxtaposes the pre-fabricated aesthetic with the intimacies of handmade objects. Her State Skool Chairs and Clone State Chairs from 2014 solo exhibition Columbine Library in Berlin are simple fabricated reproductions of chairs from a high school library setting positioned adjacent to one another and furnished with handmade backpacks of fabric and ballet slippers imbued with adolescent pop culture references. From the same 2014 exhibition, Clone State Bookcase is also a wood and metal fabrication of a bookcase, filled with handcrafted plush dolls in lieu of books. Her 2016 solo exhibition Columbine Cafeteria maintains this approach, fabricating cafeteria tables, chairs, and wardrobes to be adorned with handmade articles of clothing. This contrast between the fabricated and the handmade works to show the stark relationships between the cold, sterile aesthetics of mass-produced space and the personal intimacies of youth cultures that Rogers approaches in her work’s conceptual meditations. For her own attention, the customized details of pieces like the dolls or bags get highlighted, revealing a personal dedication and a fixation on the references she connects in the work.
(Clone State Bookcase. Maple wood, metal, Limited-Edition Elliott Smith plush dolls, "Ferdinand the Bull" third-place mourning ribbons, casters. 97 x 121.5 x 24 inches)
For Rogers practice, these references pull from a network of her own interests, hobbies, and personal history. Characters like Gaz Membrane from early 2000s cartoon Invader Zim, Jeanne D’Arc and Mandy Moore of MTV cartoon Clone High from the same time, singer-songwriter Elliott Smith noted for potentially taking his own life via stab wounds in 2003, along with dozens of other small, niche and nuanced references all appear throughout Roger’s works. On approaching her practice, most of these references needed my own research; I’d understood certain references like Invader Zim or allusions to roleplaying game/website Neopets, though I’m fortunately coming from the cultural standpoint of being born just two years after Rogers. Other references I needed to look up and spend more time with beyond a quick web search to gain some background context to Rogers’ referential motifs. (Thoroughly recommend a watch of Clone High.) In her State Skool Bench pieces from Columbine Cafeteria, Rogers depicts reproductions of these characters reading poetry, set on backdrops of Columbine High School from Columbine, Colorado – location of the 1999 school shooting that Rogers uses as a contextual underpinning for the two exhibitions. In using these characters, Rogers caters towards a very selective audience to make the immediate connections, as I was able to, or asks the audience for the contextual research. For the uninitiated, Rogers work is largely veiled in an opacity with the references serving as windows in; she creates multiple openings for the viewer to gain vantage points into the whole body her work explore. From the audience-to-artist perspective, this waypoint of accessibility is relatively particular and at times demanding or discriminatory. Or, from the artist-to-audience perspective, Rogers’ practice is one of seeking connection. She offers up pieces of herself that are from larger popular cultures: her personal interests in television shows, storybooks, and musicians that come from subcultures shared by others from her generation or cultural backgrounds. Under the context of Columbine High School, the work calls for a delicate and sympathetically attentive viewing into the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the artist’s references as common responses to the tragedy claim the perpetrators lacked sympathetic and sincere connections that could have prevented their actions. (Cohen, 2016) Rather than a call-for-help to an outsider, the references can be read similar to a teenager wearing a band t-shirt – as a signal for likeminded people with shared affinities for subcultures and fandoms.
(State Skool Chairs. Wood, grey faux suede, handmade and beaded backpacks, ballet slippers. 28 x 44.5 x 44.5 inches)
The connection to fandoms and subcultures resounds through Rogers’ practice and in some cases constitutes derivations of celebrity worship. The characters she draws to – Gaz and Jeanne - are written as troubled girls, students coping with difficulties expressing themselves and relating to their peers. Both characters internalize aggression and are prone to dramatic outbursts of language, enacting a female violence in reflection to adolescent male violence such as the Columbine Massacre for which the exhibition takes its name. In giving handmade attention to these characters, Rogers embodies the fascination and idolization adolescents, specifically adolescent girls in this case, build with fictional characters. However, in approaching some of the violent facets of these characters, Rogers also draws reference to niche modes of communicating shared feelings. Clone State Bookcase (2014) features the handmade plush dolls of late musician Elliott Smith in a caricature style reminiscent of characters from Neopets. Speaking from my own experience with the website, Neopets was (and still is) a platform for youth-based message boards in which users were able to anonymously connect with one another in the innocent-appearing context of a comic-styled web game. For a developing adolescent, sharing feelings of controversial and troubling matters such as internal aggression and depression becomes much easier under the guise of anonymity. Platforms like Neopets from the early 2000s evolved over the next decade into blog websites such as Tumblr, creating spaces for users to explore morally ambiguous topics. In her practice, Rogers investigates subculture circles on these platforms such as one devoted to a romantic fantasized obsession with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine Massacre. (Rogers, 2016) Coming as a post-internet reflection of media’s response to the event fifteen years prior, Rogers explores the outlets that allowed the developing millennial generation to communally work through their internalized struggle with the projected truths of the tragedy.
Poetry Reading with Gazlene Membrane in Columbine Cafeteria.
For a niche fandom community, being able to speak and express oneself anonymously on an issue otherwise seen as controversial or immoral comes as a rebellious act against repression of emotion. Just as teenage girls’ fanatic response to The Beatles in the mid-20th century can be historically read as enactment of freedom against sexual repression (Cohen 2016), these subcultures Rogers embodies in her practice can be liberating or comforting for an adolescent internalizing media-projected violence without resolution. In her installations, Rogers takes these internalized emotions and materializes them through the enactment of her handmade works. Be it in meticulously repetitive handiwork as in the Elliott Smith plush dolls in Clone State Bookcase or fanatic attention to detail of the bags in Clone State Chairs, Rogers presents this embodied culture as artifact for public examination. In doing so, she creates a bridge between the private lives of the internalizing teen and the public vision of the outsider. The fan art found on Tumblr operates both as expression of emotional empathy for characters by the artist, but also as a call for the like-minded. Rogers’ work also comes as a call for those that get her references and invites them into the shared space of emotional expression.
In these references, Rogers’ strings together a body of work that is deeply personal to her own childhood and adolescence. Rather than looking at the dynamics of subcultural fandom and adolescent angst as object, she uses herself at subject operating inside a model of cultural investigation that becomes the object. Her work isn’t concerned with accessibility of the outsider further than putting it on display; she invites the audience into her own web of history as an exploratory experience. Her personal website doesn’t serve as a clean and ready artist’s portfolio as much as it’s an extension of her own investigations on her self. A now-expired countdown until her “graduation” of the 27 Club, a playful homage to a spider character, and links to her own blog-like Facebook status updates all work as references to developing youth culture as experienced online. (Rogers, Meryn.Ru n.d.) The model she has weaved together takes in the internet-millennial’s response to media projections of tragedy then investigates and re-projects that response into spaces of sensitivity. The internet-millennial here being a third party witness, or residual victim, to these tragedies and acts of violence. Rogers was a child at the time of the Columbine Massacre of which she contextualizes these two exhibitions. She has not visited the site of the shootings nor has addressed personal relationships with victims or their families. (Rogers, Columbine Cafeteria 2016) In this, she holds true to her role as third-party witness and explores the impact on that third party in her practice.
//end of case study
//below are personal reflections
Researching Bunny Rogers’ work came as surprisingly enlightening for my own practice on some facets I’m realizing I’d been getting advised on though that advice had not been connecting. As a teacher, I approached Rogers’ body of work looking for another artist interested in adolescent development in the 21st century. I didn’t expect to find work that was as self-indulgent – looking to her own cosmology as subject rather than focusing on a model as object. This contextualization and re-projection of personal history positions herself as a conduit for cultural reflection. In my own practice, I’ve been interested in researching and building models of similar cultural reflection, though had largely left my own histories as a millennial out of the work. I kept getting asked where I was in my own work, to which I’d usually freeze up and start rambling about my students. My own mark was literally evident in the markmaking of my pieces, which related to a personal history and artistic upbringing in graffiti, though that had become all that was left. I admire Rogers’ methods of using her own self as access into culture rather than just presenting a model to discuss. Her practice embodies much of the facets that interest her. I’m interested in using multi-modal installation as a way to invite viewers to embody experiences and spaces.
Cohen, Sascha. The Columbine Shooters, the Girls Who Love Them, and Me. January 31, 2016. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3dx93w/the-columbine-shooters-the-girls-who-love-them-and-me.
Rogers, Bunny. Columbine Cafeteria. Greenspon Gallery, New York City.
—. Columbine Cafeteria. July 26, 2016. http://societeberlin.com/zh/exhibitions/bunny-rogers-columbine-cafeteria/.
Rogers, Bunny. Columbine Library. Societe, Berlin.
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