BUNNY ROGERS SOCIÉTÉ - Societe, Berlin

BUNNY ROGERS

SOCIÉTÉ

Being ThereLouisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2017

The exhibition presents 10 international contemporary artists who seek to depict the human con-dition and way of living in an era, where the physical and digital worlds are growing ever closer together.

Our lives are increasingly influenced by digital technologies and as a result the perception and concept of body, machine, life,death, sociality, isolation, nature and time are changing and taking on new meanings. At the same time, the notion that there is a physical world that is real, and a digital world that is unreal, seems to be rapidly breaking down.

The artists in this exhibition are engaged in exploring how these changes affect the way we live with each other and ourselves, and how we navigate among the ruins of an old world and the building blocks for a new one.

In the exhibition’s nine scenarios, the physical and the digital intermingle. There is no clear dis-tinction between where one ends and the other begins. Perhaps our existence right now can best be described as permanently having a foot in both camps – a state of simultaneous presence and absence, as indicated by the title, BEING THERE.

Bunny Rogers erects a self-initiated memorial to a dead high school student. She creates an image of a collapsed reality between a physical and a virtual existence by linking a one-dimensional com-ic-strip universe with a number of objects in detailed craftsmanship. The work has been created for the exhibition.

Installation viewBeing There

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2017

Installation viewBeing There

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2017

Installation viewBeing ThereLouisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2017

Brig Und Ladder Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017

Organized by assistant curator Elisabeth Sherman and curatorial assistant Margaret Kross.

Bunny Rogers (b. 1990) interweaves reality and fiction throughout her work to reflect on experienc-es of loss, alienation, and community. For her first museum exhibition in the United States, Rogers has realized an installation in two parts. The first resembles a high-school auditorium in which an animated video takes the place of a stage. The second, accessed though a curtain, evokes a backstage area and is populated with sculptures that act as props, awaiting use in a theatrical scene that will never occur. Titled to bury private meanings in a phrase of familiar-sounding words, Bunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder presents a mysterious and mournful narrative rife with encrypted intimate details of the artist’s life.

In building these tableaux and the surreal sculptures that fill them, Rogers aims to materialize her inner world—a personal constellation of TV shows, movies, Internet forums, and common objects—and to connect emotionally with the viewer. Culling from these sources, she reveals how emblems of youth culture have consumed her identity since childhood, much of which she spent online. She also touches on the collective as well as personal trauma of the Columbine High School shooting, which took place when she was nine years old.

Rogers’s cast of characters features archetypes of the social outsider and other tragic figures, ranging from the misanthropic outcast Joan from MTV’s short-lived animated series Clone High (2002–3) to the SeaWorld orca Tilikum, who killed three people during captivity, eliciting public shock and pity. By juxtaposing plotlines and bringing together an array of avatars for herself, friends, and family, Rogers creates a memorial for failed relationships. The diverse works on view here are united by the suggestion that sincerity and deceit, empathy and violence, are not as op-posed as they may seem. Instead, Rogers says “both extremes exist within themselves.’’

Installation viewBrig Und Ladder

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017

A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium, 2017Digital video, color, sound

8:27 min.https://youtu.be/vkAcR5oDdtQ

Memorial wall (fall), 2017Aluminum and inkjet prints on die-cut paper with ribbons

182.9 x 396.2 cm / 6 x 13 ft

Lady train set, 2017Wood, latex paint with chalk, and snail fossil

63.5 x 181 x 58.4 cm / 25 x 71 1/4 x 23 in

Computer chair A (Reject), 2017Plastic, chrome metal, polyurethane, and polyethelene fleece pile137.2 x 49.5 x 71.1 cm / 54 x 19 1/2 x 28 in

Computer chair D (Reject), 2017Plastic, chrome metal, polyurethane, and polyethelene fleece pile137.2 x 49.5 x 71.1 cm / 54 x 19 1/2 x 28 in

Computer chair C (Reject), 2017Plastic, chrome metal, polyurethane, and polyethelene fleece pile137.2 x 49.5 x 71.1 cm / 54 x 19 1/2 x 28 in

TBT, 2017Styrofoam, resin, paint180 x 110 x 120 cm / 70 3/4 x 43 1/3 x 47 1/4 in

moving is in every direction. Environments – Installations – Narrative SpacesHamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2017

Bunny Rogers’ installation is part of a series that revolves around the processing of a collective trauma: the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999. In a meticu-lously planned attack modelled on military task forces and copying the type of video game know as first-person shooters, two students shot and killed twelve of their classmates, a teacher, and them-selves. The video shows a wine-drinking Mandy Moore as she appears in the episode Snowflake Day: A Very Special Holiday Special od the animated series Clone High (2003), playing three songs by Elliott Smith on a piano in the school cafeteria.

Installation viewmoving is in every direction. Environments – Installations – Narrative Spaces

Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2017

Installation viewThe Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, 2016

Untitled (Texas), 2016Dried infinity roses, dried red berries, plastic hydrangeas, black ribbon, artist frame94 x 154.5 x 18 cm / 37 x 60 3/4 x 7 in

Untitled (Poland), 2016Dried infinity roses, dried red berries, plastic hydrangeas, black ribbon, artist frame94 x 154.5 x 18 cm / 37 x 60 3/4 x 7 in

Untitled (Russia), 2016Dried infinity roses, dried red berries, plastic hydrangeas, black ribbon, artist frame94 x 154.5 x 18 cm / 37 x 60 3/4 x 7 in

WRJNGERFoundation de 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg, 2016Co-curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist for 89plus

The exhibition title comes from the young adult book ‘Wringer’ by Jerry Spinelli, which tells the com-ing-of-age story of a boy refusing a small town’s tradition of pigeon shooting and the subsequent ‘wringing’ of the necks of pigeons to ensure death.

Bunny Rogers is part of the first generation of artists who grew up with the Internet as part of ev-eryday life. Her work is not specific to a medium, since she makes sculpture, installation, video, animation, etc., but rather is produced at certain points through digital processes (3D modelling, video editing, Second Life photography) and is in part exhibited and distributed through the in-ternet. Moreover, her works show a frequent use of elements and tools borrowed from her online presence. In her work, Bunny Rogers threads together uncanny representations of cultural icons, revealing something intimate about herself in the process. At the same time, she exposes societal norms and cultural memory for what they are: collective and constructed.

For Foundation ‘De 11 Lijnen’ Rogers has created a sculptural installation composed of ceramic pigeons displayed on the gallery floor. Alongside specially made curtains and flags, the exhibition includes five new mops using different colour variations with specially dyed grey yarn. The artist explains: ‘The mops exemplify ideas of grey morality, a lens in which to see the world, and the defi-nition of grey itself. Grey is the most important and all encompassing shade, the absence of what is distinguishable—the dissolution of that which is representable.’

Installation viewWRJNGER

Foundation de 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg, 2016

Installation viewPure Fiction

Marian Goodman, Paris, 2016

Study for Joan Portrait, 2016Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Ultrasmooth 305g

5 x (36 x 31 x 3 cm / 14 x 12 x 1 in)

Study for Joan Portrait (Silence of the Lambs red), 2016Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Ultrasmooth 305g

4 x (36 x 31 x 3 cm / 14 x 12 x 1 in)

Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria, 2016Animated film, 13 min. 16 sec.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x__ROctj9nA

Columbine CafeteriaSociété, Berlin, 2016

My last show at Société was Columbine Library in 2014. I knew early on there would be a second part. I wanted the two main settings where the 1999 Columbine High School shooting took place to be acknowledged. But the ideas needed to be spaced out. I wanted it to be a subsequent experi-ence, even if you didn’t know about the first show or didn’t see it.

I think of the library as being slow and dark, filled with obstacles. That’s also how it looks in police photos. The cafeteria was open and well-lit, with tons of people and bombs hidden in duffel bags in plain sight. The cafeteria was more confusing. There’s not the same closure as in the library, where Dylan and Eric committed suicide.

The first show referenced characters from two TV series that I watched when I was younger: Joan of Arc from Clone High and Gaz from Invader Zim. I identified with them. I think of them as being each other’s sisters. They are both filled with anger. For Joan, it was complicated. The reality of hatred is that it’s often self-hatred. Joan expresses anger toward the person that she loves, so you wonder about whether it was love or hate, and about her capacity to love. I paired Joan and Gaz with Dylan and Eric, in part because I wanted to ask: What does female violence look like? How is it enacted? It’s usually just internalized forever.

In this show, the characters, the time, the temperature, and the things in the space have changed. Though Elliott Smith is still present. The project continues to serve as a memorial to him. And furniture still functions as a vessel of history. The chairs, tables, and bookshelves at Columbine experienced the events that happened and held onto them. In the Snowflake Special episode of Clone High, Joan becomes friends with a new character, who is unnamed, but who we understand to be Mandy Moore. At first, Joan is hostile to Mandy the same way she is to Cleo. In that way, her internalized misogyny is represented and questioned. But there’s finally a break when Mandy shows Joan the true meaning of Snowflake Day, which is appreciating friends and supporting one another. They go to a party where people are drinking alcohol, which is rare for cartoons. With tears in her eyes, Joan calls Mandy an angel. I’ve sometimes felt that way about female friends.

I was talking recently with my friend Leo about why I love things from my past more. Maybe it’s because you can’t love new things the same way that you loved things when you were younger, so you come to love new things through people, if you care about those people. The media makes it easy to love new things, but it’s actually closer to addiction. Loving people is hard.

The media leads to complicated feelings of sympathy and empathy. I have never been to Colum-bine, but the media made a big impact on me, and now I have strong feelings about it. Things like the internalized misogyny and alcohol abuse that I saw in the form of a cartoon were nevertheless part of the culture around me. In some ways, I think cartoons and theatre are good ways to talk about things like that. I don’t want to actually transport people to these places. They anyway have a place in our collective memory, which leads to subjective mourning.

Installation viewColumbine CafeteriaSociété, Berlin, 2016

Lady Dior Mattress, Death of Harlequin costume (outfit), 2016Soft-core foam mattress covered with artificial leather, knitted yarn (outfit)

84 x 174 x 14 cm / 33 x 68,5 x 5,5 in

Installation viewColumbine CafeteriaSociété, Berlin, 2016

Cafeteria set, 20161 custom-made table, 15 custom-made chairs, pastic, chromatic steel, wood

320 cm x 76 cm / 126 x 30 in

Cafeteria Wardrobe, 2016Wooden cabinet quilted with velvet custom-made pattern, aluminum, clothes hangers coated

with custom-made fabric, knitted yarn and cotton costumes, tinted bulletproof glass, balletshoes, dyed yarn mops, steel key, LED lighting system, rubber wheels

191 x 285 x 50 cm / 75 x 112 x 20 in

Cafeteria barre / Yellow portrait (Coward), Lavender portrait(Beta), Blue portrait (Anxious), Minkie Pie Love Lock (M + J), 2016

Chromatic steel / Oil on canvas, artist frames / steelDimensions variable

Reject chair set (1), 20162 melted plastic chairs, chromatic steel74 x 40 x 40 cm / 29 x 16 x 16 in

Reject chair set (2), 20162 melted plastic chairs, chromatic steel74 x 40 x 40 cm / 29 x 16 x 16 in

Installation viewArt Basel Statements under the auspices of Société

Basel, 2015

Untitled (Sad Chair II), 2015Wood, grey paint92 x 48 x 58 cm / 36 1/4 x 19 x 22 3/4 in

Stone is Not Stone, 2015Carved slate stone59 x 43 x 1 cm / 23 1/4 x 17 x 1/2 in

jrasjrMusée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2015

Bunny Rogers’s three new mop sculptures represent a development in the series of so-called “mourning mops” that the artist has made in recent years. Rogers exhibited the first of such works in 2013. These works were titled “Self portrait (mourning mop)” (2013), “Lady Amalthea (mourning mop)” (2013), “Self portrait (mourning mop)” (2015), and “Allese (mourning mop)” (2015). For her project “jrasjr”, which accompanied the exhibition “Co-Workers, le réseau comme artiste” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Rogers produced eraser H (yellow), eraser M (red), and eraser T (blue)––each made of wood, aluminum, yarn, and water and dated 2015. On the aluminum pieces connecting the mops’ handles to their heads, each has been embossed with the silhouette of an evergreen tree and engraved, respectively, with the words “Memento”, “Heirloom”, and “Things Past”.

Rogers reference to this series of works as mourning mops further highlights their themes of isola-tion, nostalgia, subordination and repression. These are themes that recur in Rogers’s work. One example of that is Rogers’s presentation at Art Basel Statements in 2015, where the various grey–colored works referenced the tragic story and death of a character from the TV show Prison Break, who the artist felt a close affinity to. Prison serves as the link to “jrasjr” by way of the artist Jasper Spicero, a friend of Rogers’s who made a series of works called “The Prison Painter”, because “jrasjr” is intended as a play on the words “Jasper” and “eraser”. The way that language functions in these works should come as no surprise, considering Rogers’s prolific output as a poet, for example her well-known and highly sought-after first collection, Cunny Poems Vol. 1, from 2014.

Besides the actual use of language in these most recent mourning mops, all of the works exhibit formal characteristics that function metonymically and metaphorically––so in a way like language. The earlier ones each served as portrait of a person. These more recent ones, however, have a different relation to identity in that Rogers sees the three together as a team of “anonymous loners, socialized grey blobs”. For her, grey can stand for “the absence of that which is distinguishable, the dissolution of that which is representable, the rise of company and therefore safety.” A mysterious, circuitous arc of associations. Even the materials that Rogers used are sources of symbolism. The three types of yarn that the artist used to form the mop heads are sold under the names “Memento”, “Heirloom”, and “Things Past”––highly nostalgic language, which was important enough for the artist to communicate in the work by engraving it on the mops’ necks.

Though highly symbolic and representative, one could almost imagine the mourning mops actually being used as mops, evidence of how tightly bound they are to potential narratives and real-world contexts. Mops with this design are most often industrially produced and used by professional cus-todial staff at large corporations, federal buildings, schools, prisons, etc. In an art gallery or public museum like the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, they speak to work and workers often kept hidden from viewers given opening and closing times––work and workers also conventionally segregated by class, gender, and perhaps racial divides. Another artist who made a mop as a sculpture, Mike Kelley drew on his own experience working as a janitor before finding success as an artist (he was a janitor’s son who enjoyed upward socio-economic mobility through his education and work in art). Kelley’s “Janitorial Transcendence”, from 1980, which consisted of a broken-off mop handle turned upside down and affixed with a felt banner, foregrounded class politics, whereas other concerns central to both Kelley’s and Rogers’s work––socialization and repression, for example––are more signficant for Rogers’s mourning mops.

Rogers highlights the pairing of “use or abuse” embodied by the mourning mops. Their form, es-pecially their extra long handles, prompt themes of sex and sexual repression latent in the work. That narrative of repression––like the narrative of isolation and the themes of nostalgia and longing in general––exists at the uncanny collision of subject and object. This is one of the inventive oper-ations characteristic of all of Rogers’s mourning mops.

Installation viewjrasjr

Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2015

eraser T (blue), 2015Wood, aluminium, yarn, water178 x 4 cm / 70 x 1.5 in

eraser M (red), 2015Wood, aluminium, yarn, water178 x 4 cm / 70 x 1.5 in

eraser H (yellow), 2015Wood, aluminium, yarn, water178 x 4 cm / 70 x 1.5 in

Installation viewWelcome You’re in the Right Place

Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin, 2015

Self - Portrait as clone of Jeanne d’Arc, 2014Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Ultrasmooth 305 g, artist frame36 x 31 x 3 cm / 14 1/4 x 12 1/4 x 1 1/4 in

Self - Portrait as clone of Jeanne d’Arc, 2014Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Ultrasmooth 305 g, artist frame

36 x 31 x 3 cm / 14 1/4 x 12 1/4 x 1 1/4 in

Self - Portrait as clone of Jeanne d’Arc, 2014Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Ultrasmooth 305 g, artist frame

36 x 31 x 3 cm / 14 1/4 x 12 1/4 x 1 1/4 in

Columbine LibrarySociété, Berlin, 2014

Columbine Library is Bunny Rogers’s first exhibition at Société.It takes as a backdrop the Columbine High School massacre, which occurred in Colorado, USA, onApril 20, 1999. That school shooting, which left 15 dead and 24 injured, resulted in a media frenzy.Fear spread across the country, as did doubts about a culture that creates a spectacle out of vio-lence and the use of firearms, to the point of normalizing them. Many wanted answers about whatmotivated the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. What emerged were portraits of dis-turbed teenage boys – as well as sobering insights into the pains of adolescence and the trauma of being in high school.

In the media, Harris was portrayed as deranged, and Klebold as prone to depression. They weredehumanized, described as monsters. Psychologically, they couldn’t be normal at all; they had to be aberrations, come untethered from social bonds. Any statement about identifying with them wastaboo, repressed, tantamount to homicidal or suicidal tendencies, impossible to reconcile with thestatus quo that so many had put faith in, that was supposed to keep kids safe and alive and in school.

But the culture industry – the media included – thrives on the capacity of spectator-consumers toidentify with the representations that it generates and regenerates. And there’s a kind of unspokenromance to tragic cases in particular, an attraction to the pain of others, an idolization of those whodie young (actors, musicians, artists; self-inflicted or not). Difficult though it may be to believe, that’sbeen the case with Harris and Klebold, too: Rogers discovered a subculture of teenage girls who obsess over them, using the Internet as a forum to express their empathy with the shooters as well as a sexual attraction to them. Not only does this challenge the media’s portraits of Harris and Klebold, it in fact forces us to face an inconvenient truth – that a death drive, rage, vulnerability, difficulties expressing oneself and integrating socially, and even a capacity for atrocities are cat-egorically human traits.

Several cultural icons crop up in Columbine Library, setting up a chain of identification always in re-lation to Rogers herself – the artist, the tie that binds. Perhaps more than we’d like to admit, there’ssomething that unites the perpetrators of a horrific school shooting, the victims, adolescent girls (sooften typecast as innocent, pure, and non-violent), a cartoon of an angst-filled teenage girl, one of arage-filled girl, a captive killer whale turned violent, a pacifist bull from a children’s book, and a musician who succumbed to addiction and depression. As Rogers, a kind of medium for the subjectivity of the young girl, threads together uncanny representations of these cultural icons, she reveals something intimate about herself. At the same time, she exposes societal norms and cultural memory for what they are: collective and constructed.

Installation viewColumbine Library

Société, Berlin, 2014

Clone State Bookcase, 2014Maple wood, metal, Limited-Edition Elliott

Smith plush dolls, “Ferdinand the Bull” thirdplacemourning ribbons, casters

246 x 309 x 61 cm / 97 x 121.5 x 24 in

Installation viewColumbine Library

Société, Berlin, 2014

Bunny RogersColumbine Library, 2014Text - Hannah BlackGraphic Design - Guillaume MojonProject Editor - John Beeson30 x 21 cm / 12 x 8 inEdition of 300Edition Société, Berlin 2014

Bunny RogersCunny, 2014Cunny Poem Vol. 1 represents a complete archive of poetry written from 2012-2014 and includes fourteen original illustrations by LA-based artist Brigid Mason.22 x 16 cm / 9 x 6 inEdition of 200

Bunny RogersMy Apologies Accepted, 2014Illustrations - Candice Burton and Brad PhillipsTexts - Bunny Rogers20 x 13.5 cm / 8 x 5 in

Lalka, 2013Plastic22 x 9.5 x 9.5 cm / 8 x 3 x 3 in

Afterlife are belong to me Sandy Brown, Berlin, 2013

Bunny Rogers and Benjamin Asam Kellogg are like figures of fine glass. The slightest touch and they may shatter. The pair suffer from a morbid acuteness of the senses. Bunny’s is worse for hav-ing existed the longer, but both of them carry this affliction. Any sort of food more exotic than the most pallid mash is unendurable to the taste buds. Any garment other than the softest, is agony to the flesh. Their eyes are tormented by all but the faintest illumination, and sounds of any degree whatsoever inspire them with terror.

Installation viewUnusuble chair

Important Projects, Oakland, 2014

Eighth anniversary (sadly), 2013Stock photo, plexiglass, mahogany, dyed roses5 x 5 cm / 2 x 2 in

Shades of bernyAppendix Project Space, 2013, Portland

Shades of berny include berry, burgundy, merlot, cabernet, maroon, and blood. All “wine colors” and any desaturated jewel tones occurring in the West Wing.

The home of one splintering scarecrow,a chair in pain.A loss of pigmentation due to natural sunlight,a frozen still life.

She is asking you to see her,Much like the iceblock, locked away in a freezer.

She is asking you to see her pugalo,And she smells good and she feels healthy.

You can kill the Beast. You cannot kill the Beauties.

An unusual chair sits in the corner between two walls: “Every day… every hour… think only of ru.”

Installation viewShades of berny

Appendix Project Space, Portland, 2013

Cherished ru quilt, 2013 “Princess” Beanie Babies, sterling silver pendants, cotton

75 x 75 cm / 29 1/2 x 29 1/2 in

Untitled, 2013Wool and poly satin198.5 x 149.5 cm / 78 1/4 x 58 3/4 in

If I Die Young 319 Scholes, New York, 2013

“If I Die Young” is an installation by Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski that addresses contem-porary understandings of childhood. Similar to the artists’ previous collaborative project, “Sister Unn’s” (2011-2012), in which they set up an out-of-business flower shop on a commercial avenue in Forest Hills, Queens, the work also explores loss.

The front gallery will consist of twelve black computer speakers spread along the walls, each playing the audio from a YouTube video in which a young girl (age four to sixteen) sings a cover version of the pop-country song “If I Die Young” by The Band Perry. Typically, the YouTube covers include a brief introduction by the girl, who announces her name and age and then proceeds to sing the song, which was written by lead vocalist Kimberly Perry from the point of view of a young girl who has died. Harmonized together in the gallery, the collection of voices takes on a different resonance.

In the rear gallery, the artists will display ten custom-made, twin-size blankets—each based on a watermarked photo taken from an Internet-based child modeling agency. The photos are replaced with the image’s average overall color, but retain the agency’s watermark logo, which is embroi-dered into the wool fabric.

Installation viewIf I Die Young

319 Scholes, New York, 2013

Untitled, 2013Wool and poly satin198.5 x 149.5 cm / 78 1/4 x 58 3/4 in

BUNNY ROGERS

1990 born in Houston, TX / Works in New York, NY2012 BFA Parsons / The New School for Design / New York, NY2017 MA The Royal Institute of Art / Stockholm

Solo and Duo Exhibitions

2017Brig Und Ladder / Whitney Museum of American Art / New York

2016Columbine Cafeteria / Greenspon Gallery / New YorkWRJNGER / Co-curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist / Foundation de 11 Lijnen / OudenburgColumbine Cafeteria / Société / Berlin

2015jrasjr / Co-Workers, le réseau comme artiste / Musée d’Art Moderne, ParisArt Basel Statements under the auspices of Société

2014 Columbine Library / Société / BerlinUnusuble chair / Important Projects / Oakland

2013 Afterlife are belong to me / Sandy Brown / Berlin Shades of berny / Appendix Project Space / PortlandIf I Die Young / 319 Scholes / New York

2012 Questions on Ice / Generation Works / Tacoma

Group Exhibitions

2017Being There / Louisiana Museum of Modern Art / HumlebaekAmericans 2017 / 89plus / Curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist / LUMA Westbau / Zurichmoving is in every direction. Environments – Installations – Narrative Spaces / Hamburger Bahn-hof / Berlin

2016Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych. Intymność jako tekst / Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej / WarsawHigh Anxiety: New Acquisitions / The Rubell Family Collection / MiamiMined Control / as it stands / Los AngelesPure Fiction / Marian Goodman Gallery / Paris We Are All Traitors / Hessel Museum of Art / Annandale-on-Hudson

2015Unorthodox / The Jewish Museum / New York89plus: “Filter Bubble” / Luma Westbau / Zurich Anagramma / curated by CURA / Basement / RomeThe Heart is a Lonely Hunter / YARAT Contemporary Art Centre / BakuWelcome You’re in the Right Place / Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation / Turin

Studio Program Exhibition / Queens Museum / New YorkDoes Not Equal / W139 / Amsterdam A Sentimental Education / Galerie Andreas Huber / ViennaMilk Revolution / American Academy / Compiled by CURA / Rome

2014 Warez / Carl Kostyál / LondonPrivate Settings / Art after the Internet / Museum of Modern Art / Warsaw Today : Morrow / Balice Hertling / New YorkJoan Dark / Western Front / Vancouver Significant Others (I am small, it’s the pictures that got big) / High Art / ParisFool Disclosure / Henningsen Gallery / CopenhagenArt Post-Internet / Ullens Center for Contemporary Art / BeijingRaster Raster / Aran Cravey / Los Angeles

2013 Random House / Arcadia Missa / LondonChambers at The Wrong: New Digital Art Biennale / thewrong.orgNational #Selfie Portrait Gallery / Moving Image / LondonMinku, Are You Here? / Springsteen / BaltimoreMawu-Lisa ii / Courtney Blades / ChicagoDouble Indemnity / Cornerhouse / ManchesterLonely Girl / Martos Gallery / New YorkShades of Berny / Appendix Project Space / PortlandUncanny Visions IV / Aux Performance Space / PhiladelphiaUniforum: A Place of Nonconsequence / Stamp Gallery at UMD / College ParkEthira / Arcadia Missa / LondonInstitute Bianche / Library + / London4. / CEO Gallery / Malmö Decenter / Abrons Arts Center / New YorkTrū Romance / Picture Menu / New York Open Shape / Kompan Playground / Wichita 2012Infamous Amplification / hpgrp Gallery / New YorkSex Life / Bodega / PhiladelphiaPrrrsona / Little Berlin / Philadelphia

2011Screen Play / 25 E 13th Street Gallery / New YorkMawu-Lisa / New Gallery London / LondonGUT FLORA / 25 E 13th Street Gallery / New York 2010 REAL/LY/FAKE / 25 E 13th Street Gallery / New York

Performances, Readings and Screenings

2018Poetry reading / Hauser & Wirth Publishers, Conversations in Contemporary Poetics: Precious Okoyomon and Bunny Rogers / Hauser & Wirth / 22nd Street / New York (forthcoming)Poetry reading / Codex / New York (forthcoming)

2017Poetry reading / WRJNGER / Swiss Institute / New YorkPoetry reading / Molasses Books / New York

Poetry reading / The Shed / New York

2016Poetry reading / We Are All Traitors / Hessel Museum of Art / Annandale-on-Hudson

2015Lecture / Communicating the Archive : Inscription / University of Gothenburg / GothenburgPoetry reading / Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design / StockholmPoetry reading / Sunday Sessions: It’s Not What Happens, It’s How You Handle It / MoMA PS1 / New YorkPoetry reading / Rapport de face à face / Hester / New YorkPoetry reading / Performa Poetry Series / What if someone told u you were significant ? / A+E Studios / New YorkPoetry reading / “My Apologies Accepted” / St. Mark’s Bookshop / New YorkReading and screening / Poetry will be made by all! / Moderna Museet / StockholmPoetry reading / Filter Bubble / Prospectif Cinéma / Centre Pompidou / ParisBook Launch and Reading of “My Apologies Accepted” / KGB Bar / New York

2014Poetry reading / Wicker Girls / Curated by Rachel Lord / American Medium / New YorkPoetry reading / Columbine Library / Musical accompaniment by Joseph Beers / Societe / BerlinPoetry reading / Beers and Brigid Mason / Issue Project Room / New YorkPoetry reading / A Striving After Wind / Musical accompaniment by Joey Nikles / Unnameable Books / New YorkPoetry reading / Rumours / Model Projects / VancouverPoetry reading / Otherless Walls / Queens Museum / New YorkPoetry reading / No Petals Left on a Dying Rose / Musical accompaniment by Nathan Whipple / Unnamable Books / New YorkPoetry reading / Hero Systems / Molasses Books / New YorkPoetry reading / To Fade and Spill Out (And Look at Another’s Whole) / FJORD / PhiladelphiaPoetry reading / Blackmail Series 1 / Mellow Pages Library / New YorkPoetry reading / New Agendas / Macie Gransion / New York

2013Poetry reading / Letter to Jane / Gothenburg University / Skogen / GothenburgPoetry reading / Lonely Girl Presents: An Evening of Readings / Martos Gallery / New YorkPerformance and poetry reading / gURLS / Transfer Gallery / New YorkReading / Alone with Other People / LaunchPad / New YorkPerformance / I’d give anything for another whiff / Novella Gallery / New YorkPerformance / CON/HAL Live-Con / Wayward Gallery / LondonPerformance / being(s) connected / Oslo House / LondonScreening / Monkey Town 3 / Eyebeam / New YorkScreening / G1RLZ NITE / The DL / New YorkScreening / The Embassy Sweet Sensation Tour / Inkonst / Malmö

2012Performance / Company Safety / Silvershed / New YorkScreening / Heavy Meta / Trinity Square Video / Toronto

2011Performance / The Real Boob v. 2.0 / Double-Double Land / TorontoScreening / Boxing Day Presents / Toronto

2010Performance / Diane’s Circus / New York

Bibliography

2017Molly Langmuir, Trish Deitch and curated by Carly Leitzes / ELLE WOMEN IN ART: WHO TO KNOW, LOVE, COLLECT / Elle US / DecemberRoberta Smith / What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week / The New York Times / Septem-berCaroline Goldstein / Processing Trauma: Artist Bunny Rogers on Using Her Work to Explore the Columbine Massacre’s Lingering Impact / artnet news / August Anne Doran / Bunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder / Time Out / AugustJack Gross / Bunny Rogers Whitney Museum of American Art / Flash Art / August Bunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder / The New Yorker / July‘Brig Und Ladder’ by Bunny Rogers at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York / BLOUIN ARTINFO / JulyJospeph R. Wolin / Bunny in the Headlights / Vice / JulyJohanna Fateman / Previews / ARTFORUM / Issue 55 / May / p 144Dayna Evans / Fending Off the Apocalypse With Blingee Art / NYMAG / AprilEileen Isagon Skyers / Code is Amoral: An Interview with Bunny Rogers and Nozlee Samadzadeh / sevenonseven.art / April5 ARTISTS ON OUR RADAR / novellamag / AprilAlex Greenberger / At Seven on Seven Conference, Artists and Technologists Unite to Ponder Politics, Sexting, Fake News, and More / ArtNews / April

2016James Tarmy / Investing in Art? Here Are 10 Young Artists to Watch in 2017 / Bloomberg / De-cemberConnie Kang / Bunny Rogers: Columbine Cafeteria / LEAP / Issue 40 / August / p 200 - 204Nasrin Leahy / Take This Gum and Stick It at Ellis King / Art Viewer / AugustEmily Steer / Now Showing: Take This Gum and Stick It / Elephant Magazine / AugustJulie Boukobza / Pure Fiction at Marian Goodman / Contemporary Art Daily / JulyBunny Rogers / artlover magazine / Issue 28 / June / p 38 - 42Bunny Rogers at Greenspon / Contemporary Art Daily / JuneWhat to see in New York, Art Galleries This Week / Bunny Rogres, Columbine Cafeteria / The New York Times / June Brian Droitcour / Exhibitions The Lookbook / Bunny Rogers at Grenspon Gallery / Art in America / JuneExhibitions / Bunny Rogers at Grenspon / Art Viewer / June Casey Lesser / 21 New York Gallery Shows Where You’ll Find Exciting Young Artists This May / Artsy / May Diane Solway / Meet Artist Bunny Rogers, Child of the Internet / W Magazine / May Gloria Cardona / The Top 3 Art Event In Berlin This Week / Coliumbine Cafeteria / sleek / May Ryan Steadman / Weekend Edition: 7 Things To Do in New York’s Art Worls Before May / Observ-er / May 10 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week / Opening: Bunny Rogers at Greenspon / Art News / May Andrew Nunes / A Haunting Exhibition Re-examines Columbine’s Collective Trauma / The Creator Project / June Artist Rebuilds Columbine’s Cafeteria In A Sobering Take On Gun Violence / The Huffington Post / June Critics’ Pic / Bunny Rogers at Société / ARTFORUM / April Timo Feldhaus / Real Time Column / Spike / April Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle / Class Plus Sass: Bunny Rogers’ Columbine Cafeteria / Hyperalleric / May

2015Burke Harry / Page Break / Texte zur Kunst / Issue 98 / June / p 118 - 123Mugaas Hanne / Bunny Rogers / Kaleidoscope / Issue 24 / May / p 58 - 59

Fateman Johanna / Women on the Verge / Artforum / Vol. 53, No. 8 / April / p 218 - 224Farkas Rósza Zita / Bunny Rogers / Cura Magazine / Issue 19 / March / p 124 - 137Ghorashi Hannah / The internet-generation poets who are making the web a little weirder / i-D / MarchCarmichael Seth / Get ’em now, while they’re hot? / The Art Newspaper / Issue 264 / January

2014Mousse Magazine / Bunny Rogers Four poems / Issue 46 / December / p 156Beach Sloth / The Beachies / Beach Sloth / December Galperina Marina / The Year’s Best Art On The Internet / Fast Company / DecemberDent Beau / Bunny Rogers, Hannah Black + the ‘Unusuble Chaire’ / Aqnb / November Burke Harry / Bunny Rogers / Flash Art / November / p 47Archey Karen / Bunny Rogers - Columbine Library / Art Review / October issue / p 155 Pico Tommy / Five On It: Monica McClure / Hey, Teebs! / October Hohmann Silke / Bunny Rogers / Watchlist / Monopol / October issue / p 30Vasey George / Bunny Rogers / Review / Frieze / Issue 166 / SeptemberNava Nayeli / Bunny Rogers / Little Paper Planes / August 9 years. Fotoperformance en Second Life por Bunny Rogers / Hysteria / AugustPerlson Hili / Bunny Rogers / Critics’ Picks / Artforum / August Jarrison Bryan / Bunny Rogers Ryder Ripps R. Lord }{ American Medium / SPF 100 / August Bess Gabby / 10 new Indie books and zines that we love right now / Papermag / August Folks Eva / Bunny Rogers @ Société reviewed / Aqnb / August Messinger Connor / “Cunny Poem Vol. 1” by Bunny Rogers / Reviews / HTMLGIANT / JulyConnor Michael / The seven best net-art “things” right now / Dazed / JulyTully Dierks, Stephen / A Cunny Poet’s Beautiful Book / Fanzine / July Phillips Brad / Bunny Rogers, Cunny Poem Vol. 1 / The Art Book review / July Pearrlszine / Bunny Rogers, Occupational Postion / Pearrls / July Beach Sloth / Cunny Poem Vol. 1 by Bunny Rogers / Beach Sloth / July Veckans dikt 9: ”exit house Sobieski sob story” av Bunny Rogers / Bear Book / July Burke Harry / We Are All Traitors / Mousse Magazine / No. 44 / JuneGalperina, Marina / Here Is The “Cunny Poem” Book By Bunny Rogers / Animal / June Bunny Rogers, Occupational Position / Arcadiamissa tumblr / MayBlack Hannah and Coburn, Tyler / On Affectionate Sabotage and Exemplary Suffering: An Audio Guide to IsaGenzken / Rhizome / February MutualArt / 14 of the Most Anticipated Museum Shows of 2014 / HuffPost Arts & Culture / January Beach Sloth / No Petals Left on a Dying Rose: A Reading for Oskana / Beach Sloth / January

2013Burke Harry / Apologies / West Space Journal / Issue 1 / Winter Archey Karen / Lonely Girl: Martos Gallery / Frieze / Issue 159Allegrezza Lauren / Currently Crushing on Bunny Rogers / Blue Stockings Magazine / October Farkas Rózsa / Exhibitionism, or Perhaps Rejection / EITHER/AND / October Cunningham Erin / The Art of the Selfie / The Daily Beast / October Reznik Eugene / Off Your Phone and on View: The National #Selfie Portrait Gallery / TIME Light-Box / October Kirsch Corinna / The Digital Art World’s Secret Feminism / ARTFCITY, October Alvarez Ana Cecilia / The Artists of gURLs / The Daily Beast / September White Rachel Rabbit / Oh gURL: It’s so good to finally meet u IRL / Rhizome / September Owens Ashleigh / Cornerhouse Manchester: Double Indemnity / Tusk / September Galperina Marina / Brutal Fairy Tales, Sexualized Innocence, and Russia: Bunny Rogers, Shades of berny / Animal / June Burke Harry and Farkas, Rózsa / Postscript (P.S. Forever) / Mute / June Burke Harry / Love Letter to Bunny Rogers / Dazed / May Manousakis Dimitrios / Stepping in the Internet Shit is Inevitable / Bushwick Daily / April Galperina Marina / Children as Internet Things for Adults: ‘If I Die Young at 319 Scholes’ / Animal / MarchChayka Kyle / Fleeting Youth, Captured in YouTube Videos and Modeling Photos / Hyperallergic

/ March McHugh Gene / Lingua Photographica / Aperture / March Le Lap / Under My Colors / WOW HUH / Spring 2012King Abby / Prrrsona / Title Magazine / September Phillips Brad / Bunny Rogers / Millions Magazine / Issue 1 / SeptemberDoulas Louis / Artist Profile: Bunny Rogers / Rhizome / May

2011Troemel Brad / Friday Interview with Bunny Rogers / Slow Content / March

Publications

2017Flowers for Orgonon / Edition Société / BerlinWrjnger / De 11 Lijnen

2014 My Apologies Accepted / Civil Coping MechanismsColumbine Library / Artist’s book / Edition Société / BerlinCunny Poem: Vol. 1 I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best / Pwr Studio for Test CentreMy Apologies Accepted: An Excerpt / Atticus Review

2013 Loyalties / Übergang / Issue #01 / Edited by Will Furtado and Kevin Junk 2012Future Caves / Vol. 1 / Piet Zwart Institute / Edited by Olivia DunbarFour Poems / Illuminati Girl Gang / Vol. 2 / Edited by Gabby GabbyLife in the Cell / Issue No. 1 / Edited by Mauricio Vargas

2011 The Owners’ World / Pool / November Issue / Edited by Louis Doulas

FEATURE

Elle USELLE WOMEN IN ART: WHO TO KNOW, LOVE, COLLECT

The Media Sampler: Bunny Rogers

When Bunny Rogers got to Parsons in 2008, she discovered the labored-over outfits she enjoyed creating put her well out of step with her fellow students. So she made a mental switch from fashion design to fine arts, thinking, “There I’d be able to do whatever I wanted,” she says. And how. Today she’s part of a generation of artists who are as likely to produce a website as a sculpture as a video as, in Rogers’s case, environmental installations that incorporate all of the above.

By the time Rogers received her MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm last spring, she’d been picked up by the innovative German gallery Société Berlin and had begun a rapid art-world ascent via layered exhibits that feel at once cryptic and diaristically intimate. In a solo show at the Whitney earlier this year, for example, the final installment in a trilogy of works focused on the Col-umbine shooting featured (a) a video in which characters from MTV’s early-aughts animated show Clone High performed “Memory,” from Cats, in Russian; (b) three chairs covered in shotgun holes; and (c) a stuffed-animal version of the violent SeaWorld whale Tilikum. “I’m interested in the way the media ascribes compassion to some entities but not others,” Rogers says. “And how tragedy gets mythologized.” Entering the installation felt like observing a person’s interior world made manifest, with obscure patterns and repetitions in interlocking layers.

“The experience and how it affects you is the key thing,” says Mathias Ussing Seeberg, curator at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, where Rogers is part of a group show that runs until February. “She’s looking at how mourning can become something for the living to thrive in, and death something for the living to live through. She incorporates adolescent themes, but it’s not youthful work.”

Molly Langmuir, Trish Deitch and curated by Carly Leitzes

Originally published in Elle US, December issue, 2017

INTERVIEW

artnet news

Processing Trauma: Artist Bunny Rogers on Using Her Work to Explore the Columbine Massacre’s Lingering Impact

We spoke to the artist about her first major museum show at the Whitney.

If you haven’t yet heard of Bunny Rogers, take note. At only 27, with the ink still wet on her MFA diploma from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Bunny Rogers is poised to join the ranks of internationally acclaimed artists such as Anne Imhof and Ian Cheng, with the full faith and credit of a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

Since graduating from Parsons School of Design in 2012, Rogers has put forth a trio of works that focuses primarily on the Columbine High School Massacre, where in 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a shooting rampage, resulting in 15 dead (including Harris and Klebold) and 24 injured.

In two previous exhibitions, “Columbine Library” (2014) and “Columbine Cafeteria” (2016), Rogers reconstructs these main sites of trauma—the cafeteria and library were the two central points of the school shooting. These installations often incorporate found objects such as school library chairs and cafeteria tables, alongside plush toys and school bags inspired from the MTV’s cartoon show Clone High. The artist also makes animated videos featuring some of the characters of Clone High placed inside different areas of Columbine High School.

In her first major museum exhibition, “Brig Und Ladder,” now on view at the Whitney Museum in New York, Rogers implements the visual markers she defined in the previous two shows to com-plete the third segment of her trilogy. The show opens with an animated video, A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium, playing in front of a row of auditorium seats. On screen, three stylized Clone High characters perform a Russian rendition of the musical number “Memory” sung by the former glamour-cat Grizabella in Cats. While the song and the musical are often maligned as schmaltzy, the nostalgic ballad is not only a personal favorite of Bunny’s, but also functions as a sign for the character’s fall from grace.

Recently artnet News sat down with the artist to discuss her new work and her fixation with the infamous tragic event.

AN: When did you start making art seriously?

BR: The art that I’m making right now, I would say I started making maybe two years into college, probably when I was about 20. But I’ve always been interested in making things: clothing, websites, drawings, poetry. I wanted to be a fashion designer, although I didn’t know what that meant at the time. In my head I thought, “Oh I want to make one-of-a-kind beautiful costumes.” Then I got into Parsons, which was the best school to go to for fashion design, and it wasn’t what I thought it would be. And my boyfriend at the time—someone I’ve collaborated with a lot—made the suggestion that I go into fine arts, because you can do whatever you want. That was probably one of the most important moves I ever made. So I’m indebted to him.

AN: So after you graduated from Parsons in 2012, you later went onto graduate school at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where you just completed your MFA in 2017. When did you have your first show?

BR: In 2013, I did a residency program at Appendix Project Space in Portland, Oregon. It was an art space that operated out of a garage. I did a show called “Shades of berny.” But the very first solo show I did was “Questions on Ice” at Jasper Spicero’s Generation Works, which took place in his mother’s foreclosed apartment, in Tacoma, Washington.

AN: It is really impressive that you have this platform at the Whitney, right as you finish graduate school. How did the show at the Whitney “Brig Und Ladder” come together?

BR: I met an assistant curator at the Whitney a few years ago. She and I started talking, very ca-sually, and kept in touch over the years. After a while, they asked me if I wanted to do the show. It was a big surprise for me.

The experience has been intense and overwhelming, but also really exciting. I’m really happy that I got to have this space to myself, because I often think of artworks in the context of an installation. So to have my own room was really freeing. I basically got to do exactly what I wanted to do, which was really ideal.

AN: In two recent exhibitions, “Columbine Cafeteria” and “Columbine Library,” the titles reference the Colorado school shooting from 1999, perhaps the first instance of a national tragedy connected to a school shooting. And in the Whitney show, “Brig Und Ladder,” you use some of the visual sym-bols from those works—the animated character playing piano, for instance, and the mops. Why is this event a touchstone for your work?

BR: It fully saturated the media. The Columbine shooting affected me in ways that I wouldn’t even fully understand the gravity of until I was older.

AN: I also remember noticing the communal nature of the grieving for this horrible tragedy. It was an isolated incident, but it felt like it really impacted our entire world. But like many of us, we were mourning this event through the media. I also felt that way on September 11th.

BR: Exactly, on television. It was ubiquitous. Media shifted to where now you choose the channel you want to follow. When I was younger, it felt like something happened and you saw it everywhere. The footage for the Columbine shooting is so clear in my memory. I’m able to recall it with such visual accuracy. It’s as if it exists in my head as a reel. I want to allow for complex ways of viewing and articulating a trauma. Because otherwise, you can never really pull apart your feelings toward something that has happened, and eventually relate it to others. Talking about trauma is going to be problematic. It touches places within you that you don’t even know about. And things bubble up. You can ignore it, and keep swallowing it—I definitely still do that all of the time. But a lot of reactions and ways of registering things are automatic. For me, this is an attempt to understand the processing of trauma.

AN: One aspect of the so-called “trauma culture” is the way that strangers respond to tragedy. For example, people will often leave teddy bears and notes for victims. There always seems to be a fine line between actual mourning and the fetishization of trauma and grief, especially en masse. Is that an aspect of visual representation of trauma that you consider?

BR: Absolutely, I’m very aware of it. Especially when I first started researching and reading as much as I could about Columbine—all of the books that had been published, and the countless online message boards where people are still discussing Columbine, even 20 years later. This event was incredibly devastating for so many people. And some people are still trying to figure out, factually, what happened, which is amazing to me. You can have the exact time line, but still feel like there are holes.

People fixate on the endless material to look through; the notebooks and the thousands of pages of police reports. But on the other side of the spectrum, there are people who are most concerned with Dylan and Eric. And that could be a somewhat romantic, sexual attraction. I don’t even think that some people recognize it as such. They just seek out a better understanding of these two peo-ple that committed this act of violence and then killed themselves. So it may come from a romantic interest, but also an intellectual interest, where it is more about the psychology of children and teenagers that commit these acts of violence.

I feel like looking into the online responses—because it has had 20 years to accumulate—gives

you a really good sense of how Columbine has registered for so many people, including people that it directly affected. Blogs about Columbine that are run by people who were involved in some way exist too. Just this past year, Dylan Klebold’s mother released a book detailing her sorrow over what her son did, and the burden she still feels. And that’s 20 years later. So I think for these types of tragedies, you can’t underestimate the longterm traumatic effects.

AN: Of course Columbine is the first thing people hear or see in regards to your work, but there are also other things that inspire you as well. On the audio tour of the Whitney show, you talk about Clone High, a short-lived animated TV show that illustrated essentially famous women from histo-ry, but reimagined as high school girls. These archetypes of powerful women are reduced to an animated version.

BR: Flatness, exactly. When I was a kid, and even now, I connect very deeply with television, and characters on TV, as well as in books and in movies. Those characters were real to me, the way that my Neopets were real to me. I wished that I could visit Neopia, and why couldn’t I. So I ended up writing about it, and that ended up fulfilling a desire for me. It wasn’t completely satisfying, but it helped me to understand how to coalesce this identity that I feel like I should have, or should embody, completely.

AN: You work a lot with technology, using animation and referencing websites and computer games. But you also incorporate different materials such as plush toys and found objects. Is this a conscious decision on your part, to juxtapose these two worlds, the digital and the material?

BR: The end goal is visualizing a world, specifically, my inner world I guess. And I’m always seeking to make that happen. The palette in “Brig Und Ladder,” and some of the symbols, like the flags, are very important to me, and make references to a specific relationship that I had. I’ve spoken a lot about this “perfect audience of one.” It’s almost a reflection of me goes to see the show, and gets every reference, knows exactly what I’m saying, and feels my sorrow. I’ve realized that people can still register the loss, without knowing exactly what it is that I’m describing.

I read something recently where someone said the work looks “just dated,” which is interesting to me, because it doesn’t look dated to me. I’m using things that are currently of interest to me. But I understand how someone sees it as dated. My hope is that even with those things, you can swap them out—the Clone High characters, for instance—for characters that you connect with. They’re basically just stand-ins for me too. So my hope is that the feelings register, regardless.

Caroline Goldstein

Originally published on: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bunny-rogers-interview-1038647, Au-gust, 2017

FEATURE

The New York TimesWhat to See in New York Art Galleries This Week

Bunny RogersWhitney Museum of American Art

The artist Bunny Rogers, who was born in 1990 and is a published poet, has received a lot of atten-tion in a short amount of time. Now she is having her first museum exhibition in the United States, a large video installation titled “Brig Und Ladder” that meditates on the pain of teenage alienation.

Like many of her contemporaries, Ms. Rogers works with an extended back story. But the haunting quality of her animated videos and the impressive physical precision of her objects can be alluring, as often happens with the works of other cosmologically minded artists — like Matthew Barney, for example, or members of a younger generation, like Kaari Upson and Helen Marten.

At the center of Ms. Rogers’s cosmology is the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, its spectacularization in the media and the disturbing sympathy online for the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, especially among young women who called themselves Columbiners. Around this charged center swirl references to television shows like “Clone High,” an animated parody of overly earnest teen dramas; the melancholy music of Elliott Smith; and Tilikum the orca at Sea World who killed three people. And throughout floats the question of the outlets that teenage girls, as opposed to boys, find for anger and fear.

Ms. Rogers explored the tragedy in “Columbine Library” (2014) and “Columbine Cafeteria” (2016); “Brig Und Ladder” concludes the trilogy. In a theater setting, it starts with a slightly tedious video titled “A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium,” in which three sad young women — including Joan of Arc, from “Clone High” — perform “Memory,” the soppy hit from “Cats,” slowly, lugubriously and in Russian. It could easily be a memorial service. A large stuffed-animal body pillow of Tilikum lies beside the screen, offering comfort. A doorway with red velvet curtains leads backstage to three sets of sculptures: mops for cleaning up blood; office chairs seemingly gouged by bullets; and elegant ladders, a means of escape or a stairway to heaven.

Additional pieces include “Memorial Wall (fall),” a stretch of chain-link fence festooned with red leaf-shapes that evoke room fresheners, and “Lady train set,” a large painted wood version of the perky young neighbor, named Lady, from the “Thomas & Friends” series. Her cheerfulness seems poignantly out of place.

Roberta Smith

Originally published on: https://nyti.ms/2jLpnbR, September, 2017

INTERVIEW

I-DBunny Rogers wants you to know she ‘acknowledges your hurt’

In her intimate solo show at the Whitney Museum, the artist meditates on mourning, with help from an MTV cartoon character and the ‘Cats’ soundtrack.

Stepping into a Bunny Rogers exhibition has the effect of a teleportation device, though the realm you are transported to can feel equally visceral and enigmatic. It’s not totally clear where you are, but it’s certain you are now somewhere else. Over the past decade, the 27-year-old multimedia artist, poet, and performer has created immersive installations that are so thick with ambience you can practically pocket the aura. For instance, Columbine Cafeteria (2016) featured, among other things, a room filled apple-scented votive candles and faux snowfall as a character from the ear-ly-aughts MTV show Clone High performed a cover of a Elliott Smith song in a 3D-rendered video loop. Despite her ability to manifest a pungent vibe in each of her exhibitions, the environments she constructs are cryptic and intuitive. Her personal ties are purposefully blurred.

In Brig Und Ladder, Rogers’s current exhibition on view at the Whitney and her first major museum show, she entwines shared cultural memories like the Columbine High School massacre with a “personal constellation” of pop culture references and hat-tips to private experiences that have informed her identity. The work, which includes sets of three “self-portrait” mops, three spotlit lad-ders, and three recreations of chairs from the Columbine Library sporting shotgun holes, is installed in both a model of Columbine’s auditorium and a “backstage” area of her own imagining. Rogers was nine-years-old when Columbine happened, and while she was living in Texas at the time, the tragic event coincided with a formative phase of her childhood.

The avatar-like characters that appear throughout the first-floor gallery space function as stand-ins for her friends, family, and herself. They also serve as easter eggs, with certain objects and materials (Precious Moments plush toys, ribbons, Jelly Pen ink) nodding to personal history as well as past exhibitions. (In Brig Und Ladder, Joan from Clone High sings “Memories” from Cats in Russian in a new 3D-rendered video loop.) All together, the installation adds layers to Rogers’s ever-expanding visual vernacular, while inspiring viewers — at least this one — to sub in their own avatars and meditate on loss, mourning, and ultimately connection.

You’ve explored Columbine and concepts related to mourning in many different works. What push-es to keep grappling with these same themes?

A lot of the time, I’m thinking about relationships with people in my life — relationships that are ongoing, or relationships that have failed, or have seemingly failed. I don’t see an end to any rela-tionship I’ve ever had. Similarly, I don’t believe that it makes sense to ascribe mourning as having a beginning and an end. I’ve always carried this sensation of loss, and it took me a long time to realize that it was an affectation. That it was something I was imbuing in everything I was seeing, in every relationship I was entering.

You once said that you view the world through a sad lens, and as a result things reveal themselves in a way that’s the most honest or beautiful. Do you still feel that way?

I don’t want to say “most beautiful,” but what I have found is that when I feel like I’m most reflecting the characteristics of my depression — slow, introverted, maybe more careful, maybe less opti-mistic or something — it makes me feel more connected to other people, even if on an interactive level it is alienating.

Why do you use Columbine, in particular, as a recurring lens to examine mourning and loss — es-pecially when there have been many other school shootings in recent years?

This was a shooting that happened at a formative time for me. I was nine and living in Texas. The three years I spent there I remember vividly. It’s where I started playing Neopets, and where I met my best friend of my childhood. I can’t really explain why memories fit together for me in the way they have, but I guess in my artwork it’s me trying to assemble them so I can create some kind of record, or departure point.

I read something [about how memory works] a long time ago and it really stuck with me. Each time you recall a memory, it changes or shifts. That’s not taking into account how much we lie to our-selves and how skewed our perceptions are to begin with. We’re all delusional, whether or not we want to be. And even if you work against it, you can’t escape your blind spots; if anything, working against them might have different types of delusional consequences.

When you try to correct something you see as a character flaw, it’s difficult not to overcompensate, and then again, and then again, and the process is like Tetris. The game ends and by that time people have been hurt and you’ve adjusted, but in what ways you’re not exactly sure, though you tried your best, and you’re stuck.... and the new game starts up and you feel better equipped but the pieces have changed and the problems are different. Anyway, I see my artwork like that — like a Tetris metaphor about stacking blocks and it getting harder to see the bottom. So I can’t purely recall something.

Do you view Columbine as a pathway to revisit that formative time of your life in Texas?

Maybe. In the moment the Columbine massacre happened, I can recall the media on television, but I don’t remember how I felt about it. I don’t remember much more than confusion. It wasn’t until later on (and after going through high school) when I began researching Columbine and revisiting its initial documentation, that the gravity of what had occurred actually resonated: A small-town tragedy so devastating it swallowed a nation whole and the complete (moral, political, ideological) destabilizing that inevitably followed, resulting in an open question regarding the immeasurable reach of loss — be it individual, collective, communal, or national. [Columbine] was at an age when I felt alien. I didn’t feel like a person. I definitely didn’t feel like I was a girl. I felt perverse and that there wasn’t a place for me.

Did that friendship make you feel like there was a place for you?

The way I think about this relationship with my friend [from Texas] is relatively unusual. When I was 10, my family moved to New York, and it decapitated this relationship, but also encapsulated it in this idyllic way. My moving kept it in this vacuum of youth. As I got older and started participating in new relationships, I was constantly comparing those relationships to this one best friend I had, and I struggled with issues of loyalty. Why can’t people just have one person, and why aren’t they satisfied with one person?

I remember talking with this same friend from Texas a few years later, and she had made new friends with me having gone. And I had not made any new friends in my new school. I felt betrayed. When I think of [the Columbine shooters] Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, I can’t help but see them memorialized with each other, as a relationship between two people. You can’t think of Dylan’s death without Eric’s death. I think that’s a fantasy for a lot of people, especially a lot of young peo-ple: to remove the fear of being alone in life and in death. We go to extreme lengths to ensure that we don’t face death by ourselves.

Is there a parallel between struggling to move past that time in your life and the exhibition’s looping video, which is like a static memory repeating itself?

In short, yes. The animation is a looping performance, and the sculptures are static. The chairs [in the back room of the installation] are damaged, but there’s no indication of what they looked like before, or if they were meant to be fixed or replaced. For instance, Columbine Library was com-pletely redone after the massacre.

You watch a memory like a movie, or a clip from a movie, but you’re outside it. Maybe it’s fuzzy and whole, or clear and segmented. You go behind it, “backstage,” and all the pieces — these affected sculptures — are isolated and suspended. They are suspended in shadow. And you can still hear the audio starting over, but it’s quieter. It’s repeating itself, and a song stuck in your head is men-acing, not pacifying — even if it’s “Memory” from Cats, even if it’s in an unfamiliar language, even if it’s your favorite character’s theme song. You love that character for weird reasons and you connect to her theme about surrendering to death, even though you are eight-years-old.

I watched Cats on VHS at least 100 times. I knew all the lyrics and choreography to all the songs. It would end and I would rewind it and watch it again. But I had this process of consumption with everything. I still practice it. It’s a part of me. It used to clearly happen with things I knew I loved or obsessed over. But I tried making a list when I was 17 — “Everything I’ve Ever Been Addicted To” — and it never ended. I couldn’t draw a line between compulsive and non-compulsive behavior. The nature of addiction kept broadening, in my life and in my head.

Making artwork helps me organize thoughts and feelings that would otherwise repeat endlessly if left internal. I’m so afraid of forgetting. If my thoughts and feelings, and especially memories, are erratic and untrustworthy, in artworks they can, by my logic, be pinned down. And if I succeed in that transference, momentarily I feel a resolve.

You’ve described your mop works as “self-portraits” in the past. Do you view the ladders similarly? The ladders are portraits, and one of them represents me. Also, there’s ladders, bridges, and trains in the exhibition. Bridges and ladders are means of connecting to separate places. The train is a means of getting to a place, but it’s not on tracks, it’s not moving around the exhibition. It’s some-thing that’s non-functioning and static, too.

I left the exhibition with the feeling that it was simultaneously extremely personal and also very cryptic — and you seem intent on keeping it that way. I’m curious about how that tension makes you feel.

It makes me think about how certain people who exist for me in this installation have been present in many artworks I’ve made. It’s objectifying to make work about someone you care about but can’t communicate with anymore — it kind of makes me feel like it’s an unwanted gift to these people. I think it makes sense that the people are represented with objects and avatars [in my work]. And there are also characters I attach to, so that’s why they reappear, but with them it’s more like dis-placing feelings.

It’s complicated to make absence into artwork that’s not objectifying. You’re creating things to fill these spaces. Is it really empty, is it really absence?

There is so much left behind. Presence is the slowest dissipating substance. When someone leaves your life, someone you’ve had an intimate relationship with... even if they stop talking to you cold and you never talk again and never see them again, that doesn’t mean it’s resolved. I feel like those remnants were the basis for making these works.

Can you elaborate on that more?

I think all my artwork is me trying to connect with at least someone. Regarding being somewhat cryptic, I mentioned that I have this idea of the perfect audience — someone who sees the work and understands everything, immediately. Without explanation, this person sees it and is left with this feeling that they understand: I see you, you see me.

I once wrote this one poem that was like, “Special recognises special / hurt recognises hurt.”A lot of my life, I’ve felt invisible. And also, when I’m struggling with something or I’m hurting, my first thought is, I want to disappear; I want to go away. It’s a feeling that even if you’re there, physically present, someone could put their hand through you. It’s different than being a ghost. I have this

other poem: “It means so much to have your words remembered / It means so much to have your pain acknowledged,” and I guess that’s what it’s about — someone acknowledging your hurt. And, from my perspective, wanting to say it to other people that are hurting: I acknowledge you.

Zach Sokol

Originally published on: https://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/9kkjb3/bunny-rogers-wants-you-to-know-she-acknowledges-your-hurt, August, 2017

REVIEW

TimeOut New YorkBunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder

Born in 1990, Bunny Rogers grew up on the internet, and her art vividly conveys a childhood lived partly in the real world and partly online. Her installation is the third in a trilogy set at Columbine High School, scene of the 1999 school shooting. While the first two parts revolved around Colum-bine’s library and cafeteria, respectively, the third centers on the school’s auditorium.

In a darkened theater furnished with a large toy orca representing the SeaWorld animal that killed three people, an animated video features characters appropriated from MTV’s series Clone High. Stand-ins for the artist, her family and her friends, they sing a Russian rendition of “Memory” from Cats, a lugubrious performance that, like the cuddly orca, represents an attempt to heal public and private trauma. Another series of sculptures—including three savaged office chairs and a chain-link fence decorated with autumn leaves—suggests the aftermath of violence and rituals of mourning.

Rogers’s work is surprisingly potent, tapping into a peculiarly American strain of weirdness, teen-age angst and the uncertain comforts of family and community. Sometimes these things combine to produce tragedies like Columbine. At other times they conspire to create artists of promise like Rogers.

Anne Doran

Originally published on https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/bunny-rogers-brig-und-ladder, Au-gust, 2017

REVIEW

Flash ArtBunny Rogers Whitney Museum of American Art / New York

After “Columbine Library” (2014, at Société in Berlin) and “Columbine Cafeteria” (2016, at Green-spon in New York), “Brig Und Ladder” is Bunny Rogers’s third show partially dedicated to me-morializing the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, thus making it the final part of a sort of architectural trilogy.

As with the previous exhibitions, here Rogers faultlessly displays a signature lexicon: alternative cartoon characters from the early 2000s, mass murder, stuffed animals, cartoonish domestic ob-jects and the impenetrable sadness of teenagers.

The centerpiece of the show is the video A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Audi-torium (all works 2017), presented in a carpeted screening room with six spring-assisted folding auditorium chairs (Columbine Auditorium seating). Sitting in the auditorium chairs, we watch three animated characters (crude 3-D adaptations of characters from Clone High) ascend to the auditori-um stage and perform a Russian rendition of a song from the musical Cats. While any true occasion for the “holiday performance” is indiscernible, it is understood to be related to the thirteen killed in the massacre — as a memorial, the limp and creepy preciousness of the recital casts an ambigu-ous mood of mourning that feels both earnest and put-on.

On the floor in front of the video lies a limp stuffed animal with a homemade quilting patch stitched to its abdomen (Tilikum body pillow). Rogers’s stated interest in the Columbine shooting involves online communities of teenage girls who express a fantastical and empathetic attraction for Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the tortured pseudo-goths who shot up their high school; Tilikum, the now-dead orca whale who killed two SeaWorld employees and a hapless trespasser, became an object of empathy largely due to the 2013 documentary Black Fish, which detailed the brutal treatment of whales in captivity. A homely body pillow of an actual killer whale speaks to the overwhelming and haphazard capacity of empathy: in this case, horror at human cruelty displaced and converted into warm feelings for a whale who, while deserving of respect and freedom, is unlikely to be a (huggable) friend of human people.

Beyond the screening room are a series of spotlit works (three wrecked office chairs, two sets of giant ladders and mops, a Thomas the Tank Engine toy, air fresheners hanging on a fence) that, per the press release, are to be understood as related to the artist’s own life and lost relationships. Their impenetrability makes them hermetic as objects of memorial or autobiography. The cheesy maroon curtains, then, differentiate between an onstage area that, with the Columbine memorial scene and Tilikum pillow, seems to speak to the inadequacy of empathy to deal with structural trag-edy or individualized pain, and a backstage so oblique that it refuses anything like an identificatory response — with diaristic intimacy providing only the possibility for further alienation.

Jack Gross

Originally published on https://www.flashartonline.com/2017/08/bunny-rogers-whitney-museum-of-american-art-new-york/, August, 2017

REVIEW

BLOUIN ARTINFO ‘Brig Und Ladder’ by Bunny Rogers at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York is presenting “Brig Und Ladder” by Bunny Rogers.

At 27, this young artist is presenting her first museum exhibition in the U.S. Bunny Rogers in true sense is the gen next internet child who grew up with the computer. Even her first brush with art-making came through her experiments on Neopets.com, a website that allowed her to create and care for her own virtual pets. Rogers became known online for her provocative and honest portray-als of self. Whether she is writing a poem or creating a website or sculpting, her output reflects a pre-teen angst, friendship, and memory. In her current work, Bunny Rogers draws from a personal cosmology to explore universal experiences of loss, alienation, and a search for belonging.

Her layered installations, videos, and sculptures begin with wide-ranging yet highly specific ref-erences, from young-adult fiction and early 2000s cartoons, like Clone High, to autobiographical events and violent media spectacles, such as the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Rogers’s techniques are equally idiosyncratic. She borrows from theater costuming, design, and industrial furniture manufacturing, and often crafts her work by hand. This hybrid approach gives Rogers’s objects and spaces a distinct texture; they read simultaneously as slick and intimate, highly con-structed but also sincere. She is the author of “Cunny Poem: Vol 1” (2014) and “My Apologies Accepted” (2014) and currently lives and works in New York.

Originally published on http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/2367512/brig-und-ladder-by-bun-ny-rogers-at-whitney-museum-of-american, July, 2017

REVIEW

VICEBunny in the Headlights

On view this July at the Whitney Museum of American Art is Bunny Rogers’ “Brig und Ladder,” a sometimes-confounding fusion of personal reflection and pop-cultural theatrics.

On April 20, 1999, on the outskirts of Denver, two students at Columbine High School killed a dozen of their fellows and one teacher, and injured multiple others, inscribing themselves in American culture in the process. The Columbine High School massacre, as it has come to be known, has sparked a wearying number of copycat mass shootings, as well as music, books, movies, TV shows, and endless tortured reflection. Bunny Rogers was nine years old at the time, and the rever-berations of that day have stuck with her. The young artist has titled three of her recent exhibitions after the school’s library and cafeteria—scenes of much of the carnage—and many of her works make reference to the event and its aftermath.

The centerpiece of “Bunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder” at the Whitney, the artist’s first major muse-um outing, is the animated video A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium. The video itself depicts the auditorium’s stage in relatively convincing 3D, and is projected in a darkened room fitted with six theater seats. These replicate those in the school, giving audience members the impression of being in a simulation of the original site. The stage in the video is ee-rily empty and completely bare save for a couple of plastic chairs off to one side, a boxlike plinth draped in black fabric, and an upright piano at which sits a female figure. Volumetric, yet not limned with the naturalism of her surroundings, the young woman makes for an odd avatar, half in the “real” world of the illusionistic digital rendering, half in the flatland of a cartoon.

The pianist plays a short piece, then two more girls enter and mount the steps to the stage. Both seem even more stylized than the one at the piano, moving stiffly, like paper dolls brought to life. They have smooth, U-shaped faces with flattened, truncated heads from which sheets of hair hang down, and their perpetually downcast eyes are represented by simple curved lines. The pianist begins again and the central figure, clad entirely in teen-goth black, starts to sing the familiar tune “Memory,” from the Broadway musical Cats, but in Russian. The third figure plays a flute solo near the end of the song, the two young women exit, and a flock of small birds (or perhaps huge insects) flutters against the burgundy curtain at the back of the stage. Fade out.

The CGI performance produces a strange and complex affect. The plaintive, girlish rendition of the elegiac show tune, the weird mien and awkward quasi-life of the characters, and the magical-realist entrance and disappearance of the flying creatures combine with our knowledge of the setting to elicit a certain melancholy. This is commingled with a chilled splash of horror, even as we remain fully aware that these emotions play out as the result of kitsch piled on top of kitsch. A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium is creepy and alienating, yet also quietly bracing in the way it forces us to watch ourselves being seduced by such transparent means.

But Rogers’s project is also baffling. Specific meaning remains elusive, and the artist’s choice of details cryptic. Why these figures, compellingly particular but unrelatable in their abstract artifice? Why that tacky song, and why in Russian? And what about the only other object in the gallery, a large plush-toy orca, Tilikum Body Pillow, named after the animal performer at SeaWorld who killed three people?

Stepping through a wine-colored curtain into a second room, we find more sculptural ciphers. Spot-lit against mid-gray walls, these often occur, like the performers and chairs in the video, in groups of three. A trio of high wooden ladders, too platonically perfect to ever see use, leans against one wall. Each structure stands over twelve feet tall and sports a finish of metallic marker in a different hue: copper, blue, or purple. Those flanking the central one are missing one or two rungs, throwing their utility into further doubt. Three oversized cartoonish string mops have double-layered heads in paired hues—yellow and blue, red and green, blue and orange—like school colors. A knee-high

female version of Thomas the Tank Engine (apparently a character named simply “Lady” in the boy-oriented world of the children’s TV show) wears a bow and pulls two train cars, each with its own face.

A rectangle of chain-link fencing hangs on another wall, strung with scores of flat graphic leaves that replicate car air fresheners; some actually are air fresheners, faintly permeating the gallery with their industrial perfume, just as the music from the video next door wafts into the space. This work, Memorial Wall (Fall), resembles those makeshift public monuments that spring up sponta-neously in response to tragedies involving multiple casualties. And a set of tall office chairs, hunks of upholstery ripped from their backs, evokes gaping wounds and the aftermath of physical or psychological violence.

Rogers’s theatrical mise-en-scènes certainly conjure the oneiric, if not the Surrealist, but again her intention hovers frustratingly just out of reach. The artist belongs to a generation to whom appro-priation and sampling are second nature, so her mixing of images from various realms of recent history and popular culture comes as no surprise. Columbine touches and links many of the works, but ostensibly not others, unless, perhaps, we take them to a maudlin degree of literalness. Are we really to equate the killer whale with the murderous students? Are the mops for school cleanup?

The Whitney’s wall labels suggest that we should understand Rogers’s works as manifestations of her personal obsessions, and as the results of a childhood spent bathed in the glow of TV and computer screens. The idiosyncratic appearance of the girls in the video, for instance, harks back to characters in Clone High, a short-lived MTV cartoon set in a school attended by genetic repli-cants of famous historical figures. And the artist’s interest in Russia evidently comes from both her family heritage and some juvenile veneration of ideas about young gymnasts, ballet, and folktales rather than anything more involved. But in the end, one can’t help feeling that reading Rogers’s exhibition—and the sense of confusion it engenders—as the embodiment of concerns so private they resist legibility seems like a a cop-out.

Since the inauguration of its expansive new building two years ago, the Whitney has succeeded in balancing its exhibition program between the established and the overlooked, the historical and the emergent. It’s tried to be, if not all things to all people, at least many things to many people (the 2017 Biennial, for example, was a controversial success). Rogers’s appearance seems con-sistent with this admirable commitment to the promising yet untried. There is no denying her skill in creating ambience and mood, her consummate craftsmanship and stagecraft, or her fascinatingly idiosyncratic re-envisioning of iconic images and events. She’s been compared to the antic Ryan Trecartin, and the frenetic velocity of the more established artist’s take on contemporary culture provides an instructive foil to her deliberation and stillness, her mournful rumination, and her quirky, web-fueled cross-referencing, in all its unsettled subjectivity.

Jospeph R. Wolin

Originally published on https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kza53v/bunny-rogers-brig-und-lad-der-whitney-museum, July, 2017

REVIEW

The New YorkerBunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder

In her impressive museum début, the twenty-six-year-old Texas-born artist builds on a melancholic personal lexicon, culled from the headlines, pop-cultural phenomena, and online communities of her childhood. The 1999 Columbine High School massacre is one enduring fixation. In this new installation, two rows of theatre seats face a large video projection titled “A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium.” It’s a static shot of a softly lit stage, on which a trio of cartoon girls (characters from the now-defunct MTV series “Clone High”) give a solemn musical recital. Around the corner, in a dim room, Rogers’s sculptures elaborate on her poetic cosmology. Among the objects on view are pastel-colored ladders, mops with bright rag-doll hair in lieu of their customary white cotton string, a dusty-rose version of the train from the children’s classic “The Little Engine That Could,” and three office chairs, altered to look as if they had hearts that have been ripped out. With “Brig Und Ladder,” Rogers once again exquisitely portrays a troubled mythic realm, quiet in the wake of violence.

Originally published on http://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/art/bunny-rogers-brig-und-ladder, July, 2017

FEATURE

ARTFORUMPreviews

BUNNY ROGERS Whitney Museum of American Art July-September Curated by Elisabeth Sherman with Margaret Kross.

From the vintage virtual realm of Neopia (home to mag-ical Neopets) to online communities of Columbiners (devotees of the 1999 Colorado high school massacre), the young multimedia artist Bunny Rogers mines the morbid, sentimental, and emboldening cybermythologies of girl culture to produce talismanic objects and sor-rowful installations. Her sensibility is inimitable—she finds impossible, resonant connections between dispa-rate images or events—and her exquisitely hand-made or fabricated objects, as well as her videos, are united by a startling, mannered aesthet-ic. Many of her sculptural works—her dyed and beribboned mops, for example, or her melted cafeteria chairs—possess the seductive and often frightening air of having stepped out of a 3-D ren-dering and into our world. This is but one of the artist’s powers, though; Rogers is an innovative, confronta-tional poet and performer, too, and there’s no telling what she’ll do on the occasion of her first institutional exhibition, for which she’s producing an entirely new body of work.

Johanna Fateman

Originally published on ARTFORUM, issue 55, p144, May, 2017

INTERVIEW

Seven On SevenCode is Amoral: An Interview with Bunny Rogers and Nozlee Samadzadeh

This interview accompanies the 9th edition of Rhizome’s Seven On Seven conference, which convenes leading artists and technologists for high-level collaborations. It was conducted in conversation with Nozlee Samadzadeh, engineer at Vox Media and editor at The Morning News, and Bunny Rogers, an artist and poet living and working in Stockholm, Sweden. On the occasion of their first meeting, we sat down in Samadzadeh’s Williamsburg home to chat about what might transpire from their collaboration. View the full list of participants here.

Eileen Isagon Skyers: Today’s the first day you two are meeting, in person. But you’ve already had some dialogue online?

Bunny Rogers: Mmm-hmm [affirmative].

Nozlee Samadzadeh: Yeah.

EIS: Let’s focus a little bit on your process: how you are each approaching one another’s work, what sort of ideas you might have, or materials or things of that nature.

NS: I think it’s interesting that you used the word “materials” because I think for the past two hours, we’ve been swapping thoughts on mediums that we have worked in. We spent a really long time talking about Young Adult novels we had encountered in our childhoods and the commonalities therein. There are a bunch of books on the table, because Bunny brought a bunch of books, and I pulled books off my shelves during our conversation, so I think we’re in some formative idea-share, or thought sharing stages, right now.

EIS: Were there any crossovers between the books you each tended towards?

NS: This is dumb, but Bunny mentioned a book from the seminal American Girl doll catalogues that I think any American young woman of a certain age would have encountered. I was like, “Oh yes, obviously I know the thing that you’re referring to,” which is maybe a non-impressive example.

EIS: Bunny, did you have all of these copies of Flowers for Algernon that you brought? Why so many?

BR: I guess I collect book covers. In particular, I really fell in love with the first edition cover for Flowers for Algernon and then I guess that made me want to discover more. I start from one direction with a collection, and then ultimately I just want everything. I guess these are all different book covers that were appealing to me.

EIS: Nozlee, can you tell me a bit about growing up in Oklahoma? What was that like, and how did that influence your relationship with food?

NS: I think it’s worth mentioning I think, my family ended up there. My parents were professors, and that was the job they got. My parents are both Iranian immigrants, and I think finding them-selves raising three daughters in this state was very interesting for all of us. I didn’t love it for a long time, but now, having made my home in the Northeast, I appreciate knowing what the middle of the country is and knowing what the names of the states are. Culturally, I think it has value. I’m capable of seeing a Trump voter as a human being, because I know a lot of them, which may or may not be valuable. More abstractly, I have an appreciation for the culinary culture of the Midwest, while also being a dual citizen, with everything that entails.

EIS: Do you visit Iran frequently?

NS: I’ve only been once, as a kid.

EIS: Is it possible for you to share a little bit more about how you got into code, and your current work with Vox Media?

NS: Yeah, totally. Programming is a skill I’ve had for most of my life. Both my parents are comput-er science professors, so as a bored twelve year old, I sat in on my mom’s day long C workshop and started from there. When I went to college, I very self-consciously wanted to make sure that I was doing both code-related things and non-code related things. I eventually ended up studying art history and computer science, and then after graduation, spent a really long time not doing anything program related at all. I think my experience had been very typical of the experience of women, which is that it was fairly unwelcoming. Not a culture that felt like a lot of fun. I worked at a design firm. I was a food editor for awhile as a freelance writer…then a woman I met had a lot of faith in me and said, “Obviously you’re a programmer. You have all these skills. Why aren’t you doing this?” I was like, “Well maybe you’re right.” I had realized that a more diverse culture was growing here, and that I could be a part of it. My first job in programming was at a company that made magazine iOS apps. From there, it made sense to go to Vox where I work on the editor that people use to write stories.

EIS: The software?

NS: The CMS. Yeah, the software that people use to write articles.

EIS: Cool. Don’t you have a number of outlets under the Vox umbrella? like Eater, Curbed…

NS: Yeah, yeah––Racked, Polygon, The Verge.

EIS: Interesting. How does it feel to be a constituent to this larger entity, that is sort of shifting, or driving, the way we consume media? I feel like it’s a really powerful position to be in, right now, considering the skepticism everyone feels toward news in the present day.

NS: Bunny and I were just actually talking about the idea that code itself is pretty amoral. It exists. It does something. I think the intention that you give it when you’re writing it is very important. I don’t speak for all of Vox Media, but I think we put a lot of thought into the way our work is pre-sented, and the way that the software is presented, to inspire that confidence in readers that this is good data, this is trustworthy.

EIS: How do you feel about comment culture as it relates to literature—the consumption of words, and media in that sense?

NS: Community management is a really hard job. I know people whose entire job is to help shape and inform communities. I think it’s really powerful and, honestly, really difficult. I have so many opinions about this that I could not possibly fit into the scope of this interview.

EIS: It would be its own essay of sorts.

NS: I think that people have gotten worse at talking to each other about their opinions maybe in the last twelve months on Twitter. It’s tough to see, but it’s also hard to know how to shape discourse in that way, without simply doing your best personally.

EIS: Because it’s just a massive community to try to manage.

NS: Well, yeah. It’s really hard to tell someone, “you’re doing a bad job at thinking about this.” You’re equating “I don’t like it” with “it is bad.”

EIS: Bunny, I’m somewhat familiar with your work, but let’s start from the beginning either way: could you share a little bit about where, and how, you grew up on the internet?

BR: My family got a computer when I was six or seven. Then they got AOL when I was seven or eight, so I guess it started with AOL and AOL Kids. Then I guess I jumped from AOL Kids, Art Forms, to Neopets and was pretty committed to Neopets for the next three or four years. I was in Texas the majority of that time period, but after we moved to New York, I guess that was the late phase of the Neopets era. Then I moved on to Furcadia, which was a furry role-playing game. I don’t know if I’d call it a game.

EIS: You have an avatar on this page?

BR: Yeah. Then Second Life later on. I just moved from character to character while growing up. It was always a component in my life. I guess that’s how I would describe growing up online.

EIS: Having an avatar to channel your personhood onto?

BR: Right. Having an outlet that I could count on being there.

EIS: If we’re all implicated this logic of social networks today, do you feel that people from radically different social or economic strata approach those networks differently?

BR: Social media today is very different from the platforms that I was using when I was a kid—where I was talking to people older than me, or younger, or from different parts of the world, not knowing anything about them and not wanting to. It was unspoken. Especially on Second Life and Furcadia, I would find that there was an understanding that you didn’t ask about someone’s first life, or real life. It’s very different now, or it feels different, where most of my time online is on my email or on Facebook or on Twitter.

EIS: Where anonymity isn’t really as much of a factor.

BR: Right, yeah. Where you’re building up that identity. There’s just as much artifice, but it’s at-tached to the same name on all platforms.

EIS: So that you can be “optimally searchable.”

BR: Right. Yeah.

EIS: What do you feel like the web offers people, emotionally or intellectually, while growing up?

BR: Today, it seems like it would be very stressful. But I’m very grateful that I had access to these alternate worlds when I was a kid. It feels like what the internet provided to me when I was younger, which was an outlet of fantasy, isn’t available in the same way today. Almost the opposite maybe. I have friends that were on Myspace who interacted with different people from all over the country, or all over the world. You could really break away from the people you knew at school, and I wonder if it still feels like that today.

EIS: If that’s even a possibility.

BR: Yeah. I wonder about that sometimes.

EIS: I read that your Twitter feed essentially re-posts all of your Facebook posts since 2008. I was interested in your feelings toward Facebook’s “memories” feature that reminds you of what you’ve posted several years prior.

BR: It’s funny that you bring that up because Nozlee showed me this app today, what is it called?

NS: Timehop.

BR: Timehop. I was somewhat horrified because you can check it every single day and it will tell

you…well, it will show you photos that you took on that day, Tweets that you posted on that day, and it will even show text messages.

EIS: Wow. Across platforms?

BR: Yeah, across all of them. When Nozlee told me about this and said that she uses it frequently, I felt very guilty of consciously…not doing it. Like I was going out of my way to forget things that I could very easily remember, or revisit, if I wanted to. I don’t know how I feel about the “Memories” feature. It’s like it’s not so confrontational that it upsets me or makes me feel one way or the other, but if they were to increase volume…

EIS: The volume of memories; a cache they can bring forward.

BR: I guess eventually that will be inevitable. I guess I’m going to be on Timehop one way or the other, at some point.

EIS: I was logged onto Facebook once and it read, “Facebook cares about your memories,” or something like this. That’s such a strange phrase, because they’re mine, and Facebook can’t have them. Maybe, in a sense, Facebook does care about these memories because they’re part of an algorithm that they benefit from.

BR: “Thank you for your memories.”

NS: I’ve had a Facebook account for eleven years and a Twitter account for ten years. That’s a lot of stuff. That’s a lot of thought that I’ve put into it.

BR: A lot of free content.

NS: Yeah, yeah. It’s strange to think that this stuff has been on their servers for that long and will continue to be until it’s not. Probably when it’s not, it will wink out very quickly. As if it never existed.

EIS: Oh man. That’s really stressful.

NS: Don’t worry, they do care about your memories.

Eileen Isagon Skyers

Originally published on https://sevenonseven.art/rogers-samadzadeh/ April, 2017

REVIEW

ARTFORUMReviews: New YorkGreenspon, Bunny Rogers, Columbine Cafeteria

What could easily have been too much—a confusion of references or a crowding of ideas — in-stead formed an economical and coherent network of symbols in “Columbine Cafeteria,” Bunny Rogers’s debut exhibition at Greenspon Gallery. Enchanted mops, Halloween apples, institutional furniture, rubber garbage cans, ballet slippers, a storybook key, and stained-glass panels were among the curious, moumful, and ominous objects on view in this poetic, almost austere, installa-tion. They were part of a highly stylized, fantasy re-creation of the suburban Colorado high-school cafeteria where students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began the 1999 massacre that took fifteen lives (including, finally, their own), but the show’s power was derived, in part, from its chilling points of contact with historically accurate detail.

An image search reveals that the purple chairs Rogers uses in this work, each with two slots in its molded-plastic back, like pondering or scared cartoon eyes, are not anthropomorphized characters of her own design. Rather, they’re replicas — or dead stock — of the mass-produced chairs that bore witness to the horror. One thinks of how Robert Gober makes use of defamiliarized elements, handmade readymades, and unsettling references to the body in his environments. Caf-eteria set (all works 2016) features a round table, like the ones where Columbine kids ate, but much larger, expanded to seat fourteen.

Two of the empty, neatly pushed-in chairs — meant to be Klebold’s and Harris’s, maybe — are different, gold instead of purple. Scattered across the table, carved apples with ghoulish and sad faces lit up by votive candles are reminiscent of a particularly poignant crime-scene photo (a top search hit) in which a half-eaten piece of fruit rests among wrappers and cans of Sprite. The nearby sculptures Reject chair set (1) and (2) are stacked pairs of the oddball gold chairs, charred and melted, as some were by the heat of the killers’ improvised explosives.

The front gallery was brightly lit, as a school luncher would be, and beautiful melancholy music —instrumental versions of Elliott Smith songs — floated in from the back room, which was dark. There, fake snow fell, extending the strange, wintry setting of the video Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria, which played on the far wall. In it, a lanky cartoon girl, dressed in a ragged skirt and bra top with mismatched shoes, plays a grand piano and drinks wine in a cavernous interior — a 3-D rendering of the cafeteria, its tile floor collecting snow. In the statement accompanying the exhibi-tion’s premiere at Berlin’s Société earlier this year, Rogers explains the significance of the girl shecalls Mandy, an unnamed character who appears in the “Snowflake Day” episode of Clone High, an animated television series that aired briefly on MTV in the early ’005, in which clones of disparate historical figures are classmates.

To Rogers, Mandy, who is voiced by the teen pop star Mandy Moore, symbolizes the power of female friendship to disrupt internalized misogyny. By teaching Joan of Arc’s hostile teen clone about the spirit of Snowflake Day, a fictional holiday about “appreciating friends and supporting one another,” Mandy transforms her, Rogers explains. “With tears in her eyes, Joan calls Mandy an angel,” she writes about the episode’s conclusion, adding, “I’ve sometimes felt that way about fe-male friends.” In the arched stained-glass triptych Lisa Bright and Dark (for Andrea) mounted in the front gallery, Joan and Mandy face each other, haloed girls grieving the devastating consequences of Harris and Klebold’s blood pact Rogers was nine years old at the time of the Columbine massa-cre, that fin-de-millennium media event that produced shocking new icons of alienated masculinity and remapped the American high school as a site of spectacular violence. So a child’s perspective merges with sophisticated hindsight in this work, as the artist confronts the mediated nature of collective memory and its reverberations in personal mythologies.

Rogers’s distinct and earnest visual lexicon draws from the strategies of fan fiction — its pains-taking passion, intertextual transpositions, and unfettered speculation — and roots itself in ornate,

disaffected, knowing strains of girl culture. Perhaps more than anything, girl-style sentimentality defined “Columbine Cafeteria”; Rogers embraces the debased quality as an honorable one, an unsaccharine spiritual aesthetic suitable for the expression of deep feeling and clear cyed critique.

Jobanna Fateman

Originally published in ARTFORUM, issue 55, p 362 - 363, September, 2016

REVIEW

The New York TimesWhat to See in New York, Art Galleries This Week

If high school is the laboratory where your adolescent self is shaped, the process has acquired some new contours in recent decades with gun massacres, mass media representations of school shootings and the efflorescence of films and television shows focused on the teenage years. All of these are fodder for Bunny Rogers’s first New York solo exhibition,“Columbine Cafeteria” at Greenspon.Ms. Rogers approaches these subjects from various angles, using a range of materials. A table with plastic chairs around it suggests how social dynamics are played out in the school lunchroom, while“Cafeteria Wardrobe” (2016) is a display case with handmade costumes and ballet slippers. Mops are stained with red wine tosimulate blood. An animated video features the actress Mandy Moore’s character from “Clone High,” a television show in which clones of famous historical figures populate a high school, playing Elliott Smith songs on a piano while drinking wine. (In keeping with the show’s morbid ethos, Mr. Smith died when he wasstabbedin the chest, apparently a suicide.)The emphasis on tragedy and pop culture in Ms. Rogers’s work recalls Andy Warhol’s celebrity icons and disasters, Mike Kelley’s “Day Is Done” remakes of high school yearbook photographs and Karen Kilimnik’s and Sue de Beer’s trenchant forays into the female adolescent psyche. What Ms. Rogers adds is an eerie update in which fictional characters and events blur with real ones, coalescing in a mass of avatars, clones and traumatic memories.She suggests that even if popular representations of high school have become more prevalent — perhaps even more accurate — the actual experience is more harrowing.

Greenspon Gallery71 Morton StreetGreenwich VillageThrough June 25

Martha Schwendener

Originally published on http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/10/arts/design/art-galler-ies-nyc.html June, 2016

REVIEW

The Huffington PostArtist Rebuilds Columbine’s Cafeteria In A Sobering Take On Gun ViolenceBunny Rogers delves into the psychological strangeness of the 1999 atrocity.

On April 20, 1999, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and killed 13 people before taking their own lives and injuring 24 other people at Columbine High School in Colorado. Images from the massacre flooded media outlets soon after, leaving images of blood-stained library corridors and grainy yearbook photos engrained in the nation’s collective memory. Artist Bunny Rogers was only 9 years old when the shooting occurred, yet while studying at Par-sons School of Design in 2008, she fell deep into a rabbit hole of documentation, emotion and speculation surrounding the event. Who were these perpetrators who, at such a young age, re-sorted to such horrific violence? Are their dark insides extreme aberrations, or are they emblematic of a larger high school adolescent rage? Was the atrocity a freakish deviation from the norm or a standard consequence of a culture that submits to gun violence? In her 2014 exhibition “Columbine Library,” Rogers created a three-dimensional facsimile of the campus location where Dylan and Eric committed suicide. However, rather than rebuild the library exactly as it appeared in newspaper pages and police photos, Rogers transformed the grim scene into a cartoonish, nostalgic otherworld, where cult characters from Rogers’ youth relived Colum-bine’s grisly events. The cartoon characters, Joan of Arc of “Clone High” and Gaz of “Invader Zim,” served as female stand-ins for Dylan and Eric. “The reality of hatred is that it’s often self-hatred,” Rogers explains in an artist statement. “I paired Joan and Gaz with Dylan and Eric, in part because I wanted to ask: What does female violence look like? How is it enacted? It’s usually just internalized forever.”This month, at Greenspon Gallery, Rogers returns to Columbine’s halls, this time exploring the cam-pus mess hall. In “Columbine Cafeteria,” various items from the lunchroom are replicated in exact detail in the brightly lit space, juxtaposed with fantastical elements that fuse history and imagination as memory tends to do. In the middle of Greenspon Gallery’s space sits a set of purple, plastic chairs identical to the ones in Columbine’s lunchroom. Playful from one angle, sinister and bizarre from another, the seating arrangement shows the power of banal objects to morph into loaded symbols before your eyes. “I’m interested in the way that furniture becomes these vessels for extreme events and extremes of emotion,“ Rogers told W Magazine. “They experience things too and wear down and become distressed. When I look at old pieces of furniture, I kind of see a silent scream.”In another room, fake snow falls in a dark space while a cartoon avatar named Mandy plays piano on screen. Mandy, also a character from the TV show “Clone High,” becomes friends with Joan on the show, despite Joan’s original hostility to her, due to what Rogers recognizes as “internalized misogyny.” The two overcome their differences on Snowflake Day, when Mandy shows Joan the true meaning of friendship. In Rogers’ animated video “Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafete-ria,” Mandy performs an Elliott Smith song in a bed of pixelated white snow, paying homage to the iconic musician whose gruesome death made him a legend for alienated youth. Smith’s spirit also loomed over Rogers’ “Columbine Library” exhibition. A replica of a Columbine High bookcase was stocked with soft dolls resembling the singer-songwriter. Smith, who commit-ted suicide in 2003, at 34 years old, represents an alternative manifestation of depression and an-ger, channeled through creative expression and self-inflicted harm. “The project is also a memorial to him,” Rogers said. In a corner of the gallery, a group of items dubbed “Mandy Memorial and Mandy Mop” appear propped up against a wall, surrounded by a streak of gruesome red wine. A handmade mop leans against the wall like a frightened witness, alongside black, overflowing trash cans and an array of red and green apples cut up to resemble jack-o’-lanterns. Often portrayed as a teacher’s favorite gift, each misshapen apple seems to embody the feeling of debauched youth associated with the Columbine killings. For Rogers, the mop also serves as a sort of self-portrait. “Part of the appeal of the mop is that it’s

an overlooked object — it cleans up dirt,“ she told W. “But in making mops I’ve had this growing desire to make them more and more beautiful. Because they’re not supposed to be. I think of them as tears or excess. They have a certain capacity and then they overflow. I think that’s a poetic idea — that we have only so much ability to hold things in and then eventually it all comes out.”

In “Columbine Cafeteria,” it all comes out. The feelings of disbelief, terror and confusion. The strangeness of mourning people you’ve never met. The bizarre fetishization of the criminals and their pasts. The irrational patching together of clues that cohere to reveal nothing. The feeling of remembering an experience you’ve never had. The way history and imagination bleed into one another, becoming inseparable in our recollections. “Columbine Cafeteria” is on view until June 26 at Greenspon Gallery in New York.

Priscilla Frank

Originally published on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/artist-rebuilds-columbines-cafete-ria-melding-history-memory-and-imagination-along-the-way_us_575853cde4b0e39a28ac301b, June, 2016

REVIEW

The creators projectA Haunting Exhibition Re-examines Columbine’s Collective Trauma

Just over 17 years ago, the massacre at Columbine High School shocked the American collective consciousness. Through frenetic media reportage and public outrage, the cultural impact of the event endures, and now manifests itself in artist Bunny Rogers’ latest exhibition at Greenspon Gallery.

Centered around one of the deadliest school shootings in the United States, Columbine Cafeteria is the second exhibition Rogers has made relating to the incident: the first was Columbine Library, shown at Berlin’s Société in 2014. Although a replica of a Columbine High School cafeteria table and chairs are included, Rogers does not aim to relive the tragic events. Instead, she uses the col-lectively shared tragedy, coupled with references from her own past, as a lens into cultural issues including internalized misogyny and alcohol abuse.

The mediums and modes chosen by Rogers are as disparate as they are intriguing. One of the first pieces encountered in the space is Lisa Bright and Dark (for Andrea),a stained glass tryptich depicting Mandy Moore and Joan (of Arc), from early 2000’s cartoon Clone High, in solemn prayer.As they stand face to face in the center panel, halos floating above their heads, heavy, dark smoke floats out of a chimney and a graveyard on either side, perhaps allusions to social decay, to the Columbine victims, or even to the teenage girls who became emotionally and sexually obsessed with the shooters, a subcultural phenomenon Rogers discovered while creating the exhibitions.

In the same room lies Cafeteria Wardrobe,an elaborate wooden closet (or perhaps a vitrine?) be-hind bulletproof glass, displaying ballet shoes and carnivalesque costume. It feels like a showroom for the loss of innocence, like a Hirst sculpture, but for youth itself. Beside the wardrobe is Cafeteria Set, the recreated Columbine High School cafeteria table and chairs. Some chairs are pristine and flawless, while others are scattered, deformed, and melted. Devoid of the human figure, the tableau evokes feelings of inclusion and exclusion and their high school associations.

Mandy Memorial and Mandy Mopcomes next, an arrangement of Halloween candles and indus-trial trashcans and trash bags filled with wine bottles, all covered in paper snow, blocked off by a dividing line of spilt wine and a mop that both soaks and spreads the alcohol. If this is a memorial, as the title suggests, it’s a grim one: comprised of trashed remnants of consumption, encircled by alcoholic residue.

Perhaps the altar is a prelude to the video work, Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria.The 13-minute piece shows an animated Clone HighMandy Moore in a heavily depressed state. With melancholic and sunken body language, Moore drinks wine and plays a grand piano inside an animated, snowing version of the Columbine cafeteria. The video plays in in a room covered in paper snow, with a piano bench just like the one in the video. The piano and its player’s absences suggest a tragedy unfolding. Mandy’s only trace lies inside of the bench: two long pairs of Mandy Socks, relics of a former presence. Columbine Cafeteria runs until June 25th at Greenspon Gallery.

Andrew Nunes

Originally published on http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/columbine-cafeteria--bunny-rog-ers, June, 2016

REVIEW

Art in AmericaBunny Rogers at Greenspon Gallery

Bunny Rogers creates quirky, sentimental environments where the openings in the backs of plastic chairs look like weepy eyes, and a wine-damp mop becomes a prostrate mourner. She doesn’t anthropomorphize objects so much as remind us that feeling is often experienced more intensely when it appears to be reflected in something outside the body. The mop and the chairs figure as details in “Columbine Cafeteria,” an exhibition that continues Rogers’s exploration of mediation and trauma. The title refers to the site of the first sensational high-school shooting. Rogers intersperses the furniture and other details of institutional dining, such as the metal rails that trays slide over, with elaborate flights of fancy: stained-glass windows, embossed velvet curtains, and an animated video of a girl alone in a snow-filled cafeteria, pounding out pop songs on a piano.

The figures that appear in the latter works are drawn with the cartoonish flattened volume of turn-of-the-century girl culture. They bring to mind Steve Madden ads or Bratz dolls, and Rogers’s titles refer to characters from “Clone High” (2002–03), an animated TV series about great leaders—Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, et al.—who, genetically resurrected, spend their teens together at a high school on a top-secret military facility. The show spoofs live-action high-school dramas by amplifying familiar anxieties in figures of world-historical importance. Columbine is trag-edy, “Clone High” is comedy, one is news and the other fiction, yet both offer fodder for fantasizing about being a hero or a victim. Rogers weaves the two together in a cocoon of melancholic hope.

Brian Droitcour

Originally published on http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/exhibitions/bunny-rogers/, June, 2016

REVIEW

HyperallergicClass Plus Sass: Bunny Rogers’ ‘Columbine Cafeteria’

This will snap your neck. Gang of one, Bunny Rogers, Ms. “Everything But an Off Switch,” echoes her solo show WRJNGER (co-curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist for their “long-term, multi-platform research project,” 89plus, currently on display at Foundation De 11 Lijnen, Belgium), with the New York City debut of Columbine Cafeteria now at Greenspon Gallery, the sequel to her Columbine Library, shown at Societé in Berlin in 2014.

Is art just war conducted by other means? Let’s size up her all-fronts-at-once onslaught offen-sive. Incorporating paintings, animated film (3D rendering duplicates the dimensions of that crime scene cafeteria), hand-sewn clothing, hand-made mops (their handles’ knot holes are trompe l’oe-il), stained glass, one Minkie Pie Love Lock, whatever that would prove to be . . . the taint of bruised fruit imbued with the plaint of skull-and-bones-prone Elliot Sharp, assorted sordid sobjects d’art effect a not so solemn sanctification of those sanguinary high school shootings.Need I add the undisputed fact that Bunny Rogers’ My Apologies Accepted is the best book of English poetry since The Faery Queen?

Staying on mission, her haunt musique movie Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) projects through a life-sized snow globe whose flakes fall on the floor. Wafts from black snow-mak-ing machinery perched aloft its gallery wall. View cartoonish Mandy Moore of TV’s Clone High poignantly fingering her baby grand. While IRL, you top a piano bench, beneath the lid lie Mandy’s socks.

Incomprehension is a mood; well suited to mass murder. Mourning sickness. The whole sense of this installation is incensed extermination. Kids do the damnedest things.Mops and pails. Cops no longer clean up blood. “They say the son must bear the burdens of the father. Yeah, but it’s the daughter—who’s left to clean up the mess” (Cowboy Junkies). Mandy manifests also in a stained glass triptych, embracing Pirate Jenny, I suppose. Both boast yellow halos hovering over their heads. Blessing their union, Rogers tells us this: ”They go to a party where people are drinking alcohol, which is rare for cartoons. With tears in her eyes, Joan calls Mandy an angel. I’ve sometimes felt that way about my female friends.”

Bunny Rogers’ WRJNGER, too, props homemade mops against its walls, drops strangled ceramic birds, gray on grey, upon FD11L’s expo floor. Code Red: Def Con 1. Co-concurrently, Rogers participates in We Are All Traitors, May 8-29, at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies. Earlier, she engaged in a signature type of planking. Planking is hard play. We lie flat, stiff, face down, on ardu-ous, uninviting surfaces, say, an escalator’s steps. She devised equine planking . . . Posing on all fours, head erect, tail raised, on point, if you please. I’ve seen photos of her in a saddle blanket. In 2015, she offered her Self-Portrait as Clone of Jeanne d’Arc in the Unorthodox show at the Jewish Museum, as if that exhibit’s name was specifically eponymous.

Cafeteria Wardrobe (2016): In a worried wardrobe, Watteau’s pierrot hangs, then gives up the ghost. Ingenuous. Ingenious. Class plus sass. Rogers fashioned weeping willow chairs, devoting Goth Poe’s Philosophy of Furniture to Dali’s surrealist clocks; has an avatar on Second Life. Neo pets. Madwomen of Chaillot as of Shalott.Let’s call a truce. Originality is closer to result. Hers is not Trecartin’s saccharin on steroids, that YA product placement wizard. (Lizzie Fitch, do Valley Girls still rule L.A.?) Rogers makes a place for an oddly elegant space. Love and peace, above and after all.

Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle

Originally published on http://hyperallergic.com/298330/class-plus-sass-bunny-rogers-colum-bine-cafeteria/, May, 2016

REVIEW

ARTFORUMCRITICS’ PICKS, Bunny Rogers, Société Berlin

The number of school shootings in the US continues to rise unfettered. Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine High—sites of the most fatal of these killings over the last two decades—are em-blazoned across the collective American consciousness. For every generation, another trauma tops the list. As a young child, Bunny Rogers was deeply affected by the media representation of the Columbine massacre—which left fifteen dead and twenty-three injured, and to which her latest exhibition is dedicated. In “Columbine Cafeteria,” the counterpart to her 2014 show “Columbine Library,” she resurrects memories of this public event in combination with more personal battles against misogyny and addiction.

Dramatized installations of sculpture, painting, and video variously transform the gallery into a caf-eteria, a chapel, a dresser, or a back-alley garbage dump, weaving together the Colorado school’s institutional furniture with scenes from the MTV animated series Clone High, 2002–2003, among other signature Rogers references. In one room, Cafeteria set (all works cited, 2016) features plas-tic school chairs encircling a cafeteria table as if it is ready to host a séance, while jack-o’-lantern apples hold votive candles for the victims. Stacks of partially charred chairs stand nearby. Clone High’s angsty adolescent protagonist, Joan of Arc, along with a cameo character voiced by Mandy Moore, are depicted calmly praying together in stained-glass windows, in Lisa Bright and Dark (For Andrea). Meanwhile, in the other rooms, fake snow falls from dispensers, and more candles in green and red apples are dispersed across the floor around a pool of red wine standing in for blood. For the first time, Rogers allows a moment of reprise in her world of alienated youth by in-cluding Mandy as an empathetic friend and savior for Joan’s unresolved pain.

Arielle Bier

Originally published on http://artforum.com/picks/id=59486, April, 2016

FEATURE

Spike Art MagazineBunny Rogers

I once met the artist Bunny Rogers under the Brandenburger Tor. It was the middle of summer. It went like this:

She is tottering between the columns on her long, thin legs, and wearing a “cry baby” children’s terry dress. She is with a friend, who has a guitar slung over his shoulder, messy hair and a note-book stuffed into the pocket of his American shirt. From a distance I notice that Bunny keeps falling onto him. He says goodbye and leaves. Bunny and I wander into the Tiergarten and sit down on a bench. I get out two pouches of Capri Sun. Cherry and Safari; she picks Cherry. At the store, Capri Sun had seemed to fit to Columbine; she’d been making work about the Columbine High School massacre. She says she loves Capri Sun, and she pronounces it like this: caiiprie ssuhn.

This meeting took place during her first solo show at Société Berlin, which was titled “Columbine Library”. Hand-sewn backpacks sagged over chairs that looked as if they were pictures in a comic lying open in a child’s bedroom. There were two videos in which an animated character recites poetry. And a big shelf with sad plush animals. It was somehow raining in this exhibition. And it was about innocence.

You should know that Bunny speaks in the most monotone American accent in the whole world. Her school therapist once asked her if she was depressed, and she said: of course. She talks and talks, veeeery slowly, as if through cotton wool, and from time to time she nods off. At some point I just start nodding off, too. Swanning past us are men on a beer-bike carousel, women celebrating a flamenco hen party, and once more it’s impossible to tell whether it’s them or us who are crazy. The lion has to decide. But the lion is looking the other way. Bunny is sure he will look out for us. Later, as she runs in front of the cars on Pariser Platz, crossing the street on red, she says, There’s always someone looking out for me. She used to want to kill herself, to die early. Not any more. Or rather, she still would, actually, but her parents need her. Bunny seems perfect. She’s good at knitting and building websites. She has a lot of friends on the Internet. She looks like a Ukrainian model and is an expert in hair ribbons; she never reads, and she writes the saddest of sad poems. And she keeps making really amazing chairs. “Furniture,” she says, “still functions as a vessel of history. The chairs, tables, and bookshelves in Columbine experienced the events that happened and held onto them.”

Of course I felt very stupid next to her at the time. I knew intuitively that she was wiser than me. May-be not in words, but still. Or for that very reason. Even furniture was seemingly wiser than me. Not to mention the trees. They stood still, shimmering in the brightest sunlight, and they knew the secret, but I had no idea. Their leaves were rustling; they were whispering things I couldn’t understand. Bunny lit up another Marlboro Menthol. I threw the Capri Sun Safari into the trash.

People want explanations for what happened at Sandy Hook, Dunblane, or Columbine, for the senseless murders perpetrated by Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17), who killed twelve stu-dents aged between 14 and 18 as well as one teacher in the school cafeteria and library. Obviously Bunny doesn’t provide one. Her second show at Société this past April was titled “Columbine Cafe-teria.” She is a medium for the subjectivity of a young girl, but also for the loneliness and confusion of adolescents, whose collective, constructed emotional world she doesn’t untangle but weaves further and further through and around itself, into something iconic. You can’t see an exhibition by Bunny Rogers without thinking about Gus van Sant’s film Elephant—and hence also without hear-ing the Moonlight Sonata that’s played again and again in that film.

Back when I was sitting with Bunny in the deeply German environs of the Tiergarten, with Prussia, Goethe, and all the overweight out-of-towners, I knew that this spaced-out girl breathes a kind of teenage angst that in Germany is always just a cold shiver and never a warm melancholy. Forget Lana del Rey, forget Amalia UIman, Bunny is a reincarnation of River Phoenix, the real, true Winona

Ryder, in whose face the sadness and the glory of the world can never be held apart. I look into her big green eyes and she sees right through me. I say, Let’s take a picture, and she jumps into action and climbs onto the lion.

Two weeks ago I bumped into Bunny at the ice cream counter and tapped her on the shoulder and said, Hi Bunny, do you remember we met and talked two years ago? and she looked at me blankly and ran off.

The only thing I always understand is the Moonlight Sonata. So, with my gut rather than my brain, I think about that, and about millennials in millenarian times. Millenarianism is the belief that the end of the present world is nigh, sometimes linked to the creation of an earthly paradise, sometimes to the apocalypse. Vis-à-vis the Moonlight Sonata, Franz Liszt famously spoke of “a flower between two abysses.”

Timo Feldhaus

Originally published on http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/en/articles/real-time, April, 2016

FEATURE

Frieze Portfolio: Bunny Rogers

I entered the virtual world of Neopets in 2000, and this item was retired shortly after. Its value has fluctuated significantly over the last 15 years: my first bouquet cost 8,000 neopoints; the current price is 450,000.

In the beginning, most items besides food and books were useless – you could feed your pets with food and increase their intelligence with books – but then users began to organize their storefronts into themed galleries in order to showcase their favorite items, their rare items.

My first gallery was peach themed, but after it was completed I emptied it out entirely and started a black and white one. It was inspired by Black Roses and arranged in dedication to the Neopets band Jazzmosis, who were always illustrated in monochrome.

‘Sister Unn’s’, my collaborative project with Filip Olszewski that ran from 2011-12, acted as sort of a real-world Neopets gallery. We took over a storefront in Forest Hills, Queens, and stocked it with white vases of dyed-black roses.

Cats, 1998

Cats was the perfect movie for me to find at a time when I believed that I was a cat. I wanted to be Victoria, the perfect-looking, talented white cat, but as I got older I realized that I probably had the most in common with Grizabella. Throughout the entire musical she mourns her youth, and finally comes to accept her death – or passes across to the ‘Heaviside Layer.’

The musical takes place after Grizabella’s ‘time’, so you never really know who she once was during her younger years. The rest of the cats have nearly banished her entirely, and you wonder whether she did something to make them so disgusted, or if it is simply that she is old (and female) while they are young, flexible and fast moving.

When she finally moves to the Heaviside Layer, it is unclear if she has truly found peace within herself or if the sympathy of Jemima has given her that last bit of strength she requires to disappear from society completely.

‘The memory is fading ... Soon it will be morning’

The Thief and the Cobbler, 1964-95

Though the first version of Richard Williams’s masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler that I remem-ber renting from Blockbuster was heavily edited and presented under a different name, I have followed its development over the years and am thankful for the subsequent updated releases.

While the film is undeniably beautiful, I always felt most strongly about Tack, the mute protagonist. I identified with this animated representation of the ‘outsider’, and was also excited by his passion for sewing and repairing shoes, something that I wanted to at the time.

In contrast with the brightly colored set, Tack’s skin and clothes are grey. It seems fitting that a sad character’s expressions would be reflected in this manner, unlike, for example, Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, who is supposed to be ‘odd’ but sings confidently in public, is a master of politely dodging the town-brute Gaston and seems to have a number of friends and admirers. I like Belle, but Disney’s relentless need for accompanying show tunes was sometimes hard to relate to.The Halloween Tree, 1993

The Halloween Tree is a movie that I watched as a kid, forgot about and then hunted down again as

an adult, obsessed by the faint memories of images that I knew were somehow related.

I always liked Halloween, but I never cared about dressing up that much – I once made a cat cos-tume that I wore for three years in a row before I lost interest at 12 – but finding and re-watching The Halloween Tree helped me realize what I really love about the holiday: the accepted presence of death in all things, black cats, conspiracy, spooky novelty food, comedy tragedy gourds and attractive colour palettes.

My favourite aspects of the film include: a beast kite made from circus posters, Día de Muertos monogrammed sugar skulls, handmade dolls, Gargoyle riding, and a pumpkin-headed ghost boy.

The Bugs Bunny soup trope

Bugs Bunny is a highly sought after and presumably delicious animal. He has a great personality, can make light of any situation, is lean and supple, and knows when to show vulnerability.

One of the most popular ways in which predators attempt to catch Bugs is to trick him into thinking he’s taking a bath, when he is actually in a hot soup-pot. The whole process of Bugs testing the water, sinking into the ‘tub’, enjoying himself, sometimes washing himself, slowly realizing the water is getting hotter and hotter and then taking in the appetizing smell is the closest we come to seeing him get fucked on screen.

Episodes in which Bugs Bunny gets in a soup pot:

‘Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt’ (1941)‘Wackiki Wabbit’ (1943)‘What’s Cookin’ Doc?’ (1943)‘Hare Tonic’ (1945)‘Which is Witch?’ (1949)‘French Rarebit’ (1951)‘Bewitched Bunny’ (1954)‘Bedevilled Rabbit’ (1957)‘A Witch’s Tangled Hare’ (1959)‘Shishkabugs’ (1962)‘Bill of Hare’ (1962)

(Side note: in My Little Pony, season 3, episode 13, ‘Magical Mystery Cure’, Rainbow Dash is tied up and put into a cauldron for stew.)

Peter Pan, 1953

A seagull lands on Hook’s hot-toweled face as if to roost. Mr. Smee accidentally prepares and shaves the seagull’s bottom instead of Hook’s face. The seagull appears mortified and tries to hide its nakedness as it flies away.

Wee Sing in the Big Rock Candy Mountains, 1991

The ‘Big Rock Candy Mountains’ are the fully realized dreamscape of a fourth-grader named Lisa. The gatekeepers are interactive, living stuffed toys (plushies) who direct Lisa to keep doing what she’s doing, only different.

Not through the power of believing ‘hard enough’, but through activating internally understood se-cret codes does Lisa find an escape route from her stationary backyard playset to something much more elaborate. The mountains are a physical backdrop befitting all of her best friends and all of her favourite things: a land where ‘you never change your socks’. It is Lisa’s self-reflexive world, nourished by self-replenishing bushes and endless sun.

Big Rock’s Lisa (‘Sad Lisa’; ‘Lisa Bright and Dark’) proves that private domains and imaginary friends are indistinguishable from their real world counterparts, and can be visited with the slight twist of a dial.

Bunny Rogers

Originally published on http://frieze.com/article/portfolio-bunny-rogers, March, 2016

FEATURE

KaleidoscopeBunny Rogers

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, working with Robert Cailliau at CERN, proposed a “hypertext” system that would eventually become the Internet as we know it. This was also the year Bunny Rogers was born—a synchronism which, in looking at her artworks, would seem to make a lot of sense. Bunny Rogers is part of the first generation of artists who grew up with the Internet as part of everyday life. Even as a child, Rogers was engrossed in the virtual: an active participant in AOL’s kids art forums (screen name: emr006) and in love with MS Paint, she learned as a tenyear-old how to build her own website through time spent on Neopets.com, a website where participants create and care for virtual pets. With their overt fostering of conversation, participation and community, these forums would soon inspire her to begin making art online, which then expanded into Real Life and to any media she deemed necessary.

Rogers’ online presence remains extensive today, particularly when it comes to her creative fiction and poetry. She began self-publishing in 2002 via LiveJournal where, eager to explore notions of roleplaying and storytelling, she opened accounts for both herself and her Neopet. Those poems have since attained second lives in the recently- published Cunny Poems, from which Rogers does live readings on a regular basis.

The collaborative element of the web is transferred online in projects like Sister Unn’s (www.sis-ter-unns.com), an on-site installation Rogers ran with artist Filip Olszewski from 2011–2012. Set in Queens, New York, the project featured a rented storefront outfitted as an abandoned flower shop, the presentation meant as a homage to the two main characters of The Ice Palace by Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas.

Other IRL projects further explore notions of (self-) identification and persona, making frequent use of elements and tools borrowed from her online presence. “Self-Portraits as clone of Jeanne d’Arc,” for instance, is a series of computer- generated prints of the artist in appropriated textures and sur-roundings; another self-portrait, Self portrait (mourning mop) (2013), is literally a sad-looking mop placed in a corner, dipped in purple fabric dye with an added ribbon on its handle. (A recurring element in Rogers’ works, the ribbons are inherited from Neopets, where bands and badges are common features.) “Sister Jackets” (2012), also self-portraits, are photographs of the artist and a friend take from behind, the pair clothed in embroidered letterman jackets stating “Long Days Journey into Night” and “Putting Away Childish Things.” Her 2014 exhibition “Columbine Library” at Société, Berlin, meanwhile, explored the darker corners of the internet, adopting 1999’s Colum-bine High School massacre as a backdrop. Making her way through obscure online forums, she discovered thriving subcultures dedicated to idolizing the killers. In response, she replicated the Columbine library’s bookshelves and filled them with stuffed toys (neopet ribbons included) bear-ing a likeness of the singer Elliott Smith—the cute and plushy here surrogating adolescent angstand social alienation.

Rogers has spoken elsewhere of the freedom she finds in shifting between online works, documen-tation, and connective discussion and collaborations. The possibility of engaging equally with art and “non-art” audiences, it seems, remains central to her engagement with the web—and to her desire to produce art of it, with it and for it.”

Hanne Mugaas

Originally published in Kaleidoscope, Issue 24, May, 2015

FEATURE

ARTFOUMWomen on the Verge

“Whenever you put your body online, in some way you are in conversation with porn.” The large-type epigraph on the landing page of the online exhibition “Body Anxiety” was culled from an interview with artist Ann Hirsch, whose frustrated musings in Starwave, an invitation-only Facebook group for “Internet-savvy” women artists, curators, and writers, spurred Jennifer Chan and Leah Schrager to organize the show. But the tensions percolating in “Body Anxiety” are long-standing. This unruly collection of work from mostly little-known artists, many from overlapping feminist sub-sets of the male-dominated Net art and alt-lit worlds, addresses perennially contentious issues of representation (pornographic and otherwise). They take as a given that social media—as a plat-form for art, activism, and sexual expression, and as a potent facilitator of image appropriation and abuse—is the primary context for such investigations today.

While no one involved with the show is exactly eager to publicly name-check Net artist–cum-painter Ryder Ripps or eminent pioneer of appropriation Richard Prince, it’s these artists’ recent uses of sexy photos from women’s Instagram accounts that have brought brewing discontent to a head in the Starwave community. Ripps’s exhibition “Ho,” on view at Postmasters Gallery in New York this past winter, hit especially close to home; his oil paintings based on digitally distorted portraits of fitness model and health guru Adrianne Ho were all the more galling because Ripps is a peer of young Starwavers. The most scathing critics of his new work characterize it as banal theft and sexist defacement of a woman’s images, calling out the puerile double entendre of the show’s title while they’re at it.

In recent conversations, Chan and Schrager, both artists themselves, told me they intentionally launched the “Body Anxiety” website on the opening date of “Ho,” not as a protest per se, but as a pointed alternative. In their lengthy, highly personal curatorial statements, they focus on their activ-ist desires to promote work in which the artists use their own bodies to push back against an online culture of hidden-camera porn and violently misogynist trolling. As Chan notes, there’s bravery inherent in such self-exposure, because the threat that the images “could be decontextualized and aggregated for entertainment or ridicule produces an invariable amount of anxiety for any woman who chooses to show her face and body online.” Schrager, in her text, coins the term man hands for the phenomenon by which women’s images of themselves accrue status and art-market value when used by male artists.

But what pushing back means, and what it looks like, is pretty much up for grabs. Resistance is co-opted so quickly in our moment of screen grabs and reblogs that one obvious question is: Why fight it? It’s no surprise that for a lot of artists, gaming the system is more appealing, or simply more feasible, than changing it, and there’s no doubt that much of the work in the show walks right up to that well-trodden line between criticality and complicity, deploying “Internet babe” tropes with and without irony. “Body Anxiety” is heavy on performance-based work, selfies, references to online girl culture, and riffs on porn-site etiquette and aesthetics. Randon Rosenbohm’s piece Scanned Diary Entry About Exploitation 12/31/14, 2014, is the only self-consciously didactic piece; in loopy red cursive text on diary pages printed with pastel stars, the artist merges the look and language of juvenile confession with a philosophical rumination on art-world and sexual exploitation, ques-tioning her own acquiescence. Other contributions are considerably more oblique. Net artist Faith Holland’s work is represented by a series of videos she’s uploaded to her channel on the porn-vid-eo-sharing site RedTube. Using popular tags such as HOT BBW to drive traffic to her work, she thwarts viewers with anticlimactic content. In Lick Suck Screen 2, 2014, for example, she gamely takes her shirt off and smiles shyly, but then, instead of delivering the implied blow job, she licks the webcam lens. As her video becomes a tongue-colored abstraction, hardcore GIFs loop in the frame below it. The funniest work is by Hirsch, author of the show’s epigraph. In the piece dance party just us girls, 2014, from her ongoing video project “horny lil feminist,” 2014–(she posts new work on her website about once a week), the screen is split. On the left is a shot of Hirsch reclining, cropped at her bust; on the right is a close-up of her crotch. She and her vagina both wear glasses

and move to the beat of tween sensation Ariana Grande’s “Love Me Harder.” The artist uses a trip-py spiral warp effect on both shots, reminiscent of Ripps’s manipulations of Ho’s photos.

As Schrager writes, the artists’ “bodies appear as fantasies, mutations, glitches, nightmares, mun-danities, dating profiles.” All content morphs and mutates online; it’s an assumption implicit in these artists’ work. If they practice mirroring as a critical strategy, they are mirroring not only tropes of representation but the ways in which those representations morph and mutate, move and shift, the way they are used. The flux, trickery, and metamorphoses that are a staple of online and IRL fantasy worlds are present in “Body Anxiety” as both aesthetic and critical tactics.

When I met with Hirsch in 2013 to talk about two projects she created that year—the iPad app Twelve and the two-person play Playground, both based on her childhood relationship with a pedo-phile she interacted with in an AOL chat room in the 1990s—I was surprised to hear her call herself a “sex-negative” feminist. (It’s an identification I’d hear echoed in conversations with other women I spoke with while researching this article.) Her appropriation of the epithet given to antiporn activists by their “sex-positive” feminist adversaries in the ’80s isn’t an alignment with an antiporn analysis or agenda, though. It’s tongue-in-cheek, a contrarian response to the dominant strain of titillating and palatable pro-sex feminism visible in the mainstream today.

Hirsch, not yet thirty when we met, had already produced an influential body of performance and video work exploring emerging popular forms of women’s sexual self-expression. For The Scan-dalishious Project, 2008–2009, she channeled a wacky college freshman named Caroline and be-came a YouTube “camwhore” at the phenomenon’s dawn, mixing hipster references, self-parody, and cultural criticism with provocative dancing. Hirsch told me that she hoped to break down a stark dichotomy she noticed while watching vloggers and camwhores on YouTube. Women didn’t show their faces if they posted provocative clips of their bodies, and if they wanted their mono-logues to be taken seriously, they didn’t present themselves sexually. “Once you show yourself as sexual you immediately open yourself to trolling and harassment,” she said. With Caroline she hoped to combine “the shaking butt and the talking head,” to carve out space for more complex self-representations. Though the work is humorous—a Scandalishious video in which she gyrates and thrashes around on her bed to Heart’s “What About Love?” while wearing a turtleneck and sporadically lip-synching is representative of the tone—her aim was serious: to test the radical promise of new, democratic Web platforms for feminist self-representation; to disrupt technogen-der defaults as they emerged. Hirsch shared the findings of her informal sociological experiment with an art audience in gallery performances, but on YouTube she reached far beyond this rarefied world, becoming part of a new form of popular entertainment—participating sincerely, enjoying the attention, and scoring two million hits.

The double life of Scandalishious is a precursor to more recent works in which social media is both subject matter and context, such as Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, 2014. Using trending hashtags and tropes of online feminine display to gain followers and “likes,” Ulman’s performance unfolds on her Instagram account @amaliaulman. American Apparel meets Martha Stewart in this fake vérité series of polished selfies in luxe settings, a feed replete with aphorisms, underwear, and pretty food. But there’s also a calculated edge: videos of the artist crying, gun photos, and the before-and-after narrative of Ulman’s (fictional) breast-augmentation surgery. A purposely bleak experiment in the merging of brand development and gender production, the project offers little hope for the progressive potential of social media. While most of her feminist post-Internet peers embrace at least a scrap of Donna Haraway’s cyborg dream—the figure of the cyborg seems somehow implicit in Schrager’s “fantasies, mutants, glitches, nightmares”—Ulman most clearly illustrates the pioneering theorist’s grave caveat: “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.”

Hirsch’s relative optimism is hardly naive, though. As Playground suggests—and the mostly upbeat mood of her camwhore persona notwithstanding—she was disabused early of any romanticized ideas about life in cyberspace. Through the dialogue of her characters Anni, based on Hirsch at age twelve, and an older man with the AOL handle jobe, she captures the emotional intensity of cybersex for a child. As the story progresses, Anni is turned on, flustered, creeped out, and finally

terrified by jobe’s requests. (He asks her to insert a pen into her vagina and mail it to him.) Watching a performance of the work, which was commissioned by Rhizome, at New York’s New Museum in October 2013, I was moved by Hirsch’s translation of chat text into spoken dialogue. In contrast to Frances Stark’s 2011 video My Best Thing, where the disembodied nature of chat-room sex is played up to comic effect, Playground illustrates the heart-pounding exhilaration and fear that animated Hirsch’s online interactions.

The intensity of online experience is what I talked about first with Rachel Rabbit White, a cultural critic and sex journalist, who introduced herself to me on the street outside the museum after the play. She also introduced me to her friend—author Marie Calloway, the much-maligned (and I think brilliant) literary enfant terrible who, earlier in the year, had created a furor with her sexually explicit work of autofiction what purpose did i serve in your life. We agreed it was strange to hear men in the audience laugh during some of the play’s most disturbing moments, which led White to tell me enthusiastically about a recent event where there were no men present: The previous August, curator Zoë Salditch had organized “gURLs,” an evening of readings and performances for wom-en and “those who identify on the feminine spectrum” at Transfer gallery in Brooklyn. In a recent e-mail, White recalled her excitement about the night. “For a while, the ‘scene’ in New York was so male,” she wrote, complaining about “the whole ‘alt lit’ thing, those poems with flattened syntax that favored jokes.” (A little more than a year later, that scene would be roiled by sexual-assault allegations against its male leaders.) But during that summer of 2013, there was “something in the air among these young women, girls, who were utilizing social media, creating things and putting them on the Internet.”

Later that night I searched for the event’s press release, curious about its neo-separatist ethos and wondering which artists had participated. (Four of the women featured in “gURLs” also have work in “Body Anxiety”—Hirsch, White, Angela Washko, and Kate Durbin.) This is how I learned of Bunny Rogers. Rogers’s fascinating body of work—writing, coding, performances, photographs, sculptures, and installations—is united across media by themes of friendship, child sexuality, and cybermythology and by a striking personal iconography that includes ribbons, unusable chairs, and animals. A handmade quality characterizes much of this material, even or especially her on-line projects. The simple, decorative HTML of her website meryn.ru, which looks like a maladroitly designed personal home page from 1998 rather than a professional artist’s online archive, might be the best example. While it’s less dated, her Tumblr poetry blog Cunny Poem has a similarly guileless quality—at first glance. Rather than playing off the aesthetics of the early Internet, Cunny Poem, ongoing since 2011, trades on Tumblr’s status as a platform tailor-made for girl culture’s impulse to share stuff (as documented in “Body Anxiety” by Women as Objects, 2011–13, Durbin’s flowery and fanged mix of GIFs and memes, digital drawings, and poetry reblogged from teenage girls).

Some of Rogers’s poems resemble cut-ups, and she has said they are “collages of previously post-ed Facebook status updates, notes to myself, and collected or stolen text.” Her writing—intimate, tersely urgent, and full of strange spellings that could be typos—is conceptually sophisticated as well as boldly juvenile. She embraces sentimentality, angst, self-exposure, and strong opinions, such as the one expressed in “@ one with the screaming in my head”:

Adorability is fuckability because children are adorable and men want to fuck children Acknowledge or die wow You are dead to me

In her work in other media, Rogers’s references to the sexualization of children are often just as direct, even confrontational, as in the exhibition “If I Die Young,” 2013, a collaboration with Filip Olszewski at the Brooklyn gallery 319 Scholes. The front gallery was filled with small speakers, each playing a cover of the eponymous pop song performed by a young girl. Together, these audio clips, ripped from YouTube, formed a composite children’s choir. Twin-size blankets filled the rear gallery like satin-trimmed monochrome paintings, the hue of each one determined by the average

pixel color of a photo taken from an online “child modeling agency.” They’re abstract memorials: No trace of the source images remains except for the websites’ digital watermarks embroidered on the fleecy fabric. One muted blanket is emblazoned with the mysterious tag OCEANE DREAMS, another with the blatant PRETEEN PUSSY.

Rogers’s “Pones” series, 2009–, is just as disturbing. Poning is planking’s perverse sister, a porn-in-flected performance that evokes a child’s game, a teen prank, and a meme. With her back perfectly straight and head up, Rogers poses on her hands and knees in the middle of a street, in a tree, on a boulder. Is she a pony? A dog? A chair? In assuming this position of obedience and sexual access in absurd settings, she seems to both mock and give in to a repressed cultural obsession. In an e-mail to me, Hirsch broached the question of criticality directly, recalling that when images from the “Pones” series began circulating, “there was a ‘debate’ between some people in the ‘post-In-ternet’ art scene, questioning what those were about. . . . I was perplexed at first, but then I saw she was really on to something with this combination of sexuality, innocence, darkness, complacency.” Hirsch wrote that she sees an affinity between Rogers’s work and her own, an overlap in subject matter, though Rogers’s approach is “poetic,” and her own “more straightforward.” What strikes me is their similarly compelling, though stylistically very different, renderings of the psychic bleed between real and online worlds—a blurring that’s particularly prone to occur when Internet spaces and platforms are explored with escapist passion, sexual curiosity, or utopian hope by kids. Both artists show the perils of this interstitial space without extracting a moral. Body anxiety is partly a function of the pressure to be perfect, but it’s also partly a function of this condition—what does embodiment, cyborgian or otherwise, really mean in this context of constant slippage?

ONE OF THE STRONGEST PIECES in “Body Anxiety” is artist and writer Hannah Black’s My Bodies, 2014, a short video that, contrary to the curatorial emphasis on women’s images of themselves, doesn’t show her body. Chan told me she thinks of the piece as the show’s “thesis statement,” a metacommentary on what it is to have a body—and what it means to represent that body—in a society of gender and racial hierarchies. The piece begins with a montage of images Black found by googling “CEO” and “executive.”

The slide show of cropped corporate portraits is accompanied by a discordant sound track of short samples culled from R & B–inflected pop songs: While watching a succession of white guys in suits, we hear Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Mariah Carey, among others, sing the phrase “my body.” The second section of the video is a poem presented in title cards that appear over images of sub-terranean caves. Proposing a scenario of reincarnation, the poem begins, “If you die with your arms around a red skinned dog / bathed in the light of your laptop”; in an interview, the artist asks, “If you came back . . . would you have the body of a woman again? Or a woman of color?”

Writing about the inclusion of her video in “Body Anxiety” in an e-mail, Black reflected that the piece is “partly a critique of the white-feminist conception of the body, the heritage from the ’60s and ’70s which involves the affirmation of white nudity, displaying the agency of white naked bod-ies.” It’s a heritage that informs one of the central artistic strategies of the show. When we spoke, Chan expressed self-critical despair—prompted in part by comments on Starwave—over the inad-equate presence of women of color and of queer and trans artists in “Body Anxiety.” She wondered whether the focus on work that took pleasure in performances of femininity—all those Internet babes—played a role in the unconscious skewing of the curatorial selection toward conventionally attractive white women artists. While many of the show’s artists—unclothed and not—contest the appropriation of women’s sexuality in porn, mass culture, and men’s art, fewer challenge popular feminist representations of sexual liberation. Which bodies (or artists) get to be freedom’s icons and emissaries? Our conversation underscored the show’s place in a history of bold and imperfect fem-inist artists’ attempts to provide political correctives—or simply provocative counters—to sexism in the art world, in mass culture, and in everyday life.

Whatever the flaws of “Body Anxiety,” or the limits of the network of young artists its curators drew from, the exhibition is an important representation of the feminist malaise of a generation, those whose critique of porn culture emerges from their own formative sexual experiences and from their

ongoing engagement with porn and other zones of sexual expression online. As skeptical inheritors of the third-wave pro-sex torch, they share no unified agenda, only a cultural predicament. If to put an image of one’s body on the Internet is to frame it with the apparatus of porn, to lose control of its circulation, and to expose oneself to the cultural anxiety, sexist scrutiny, and confounding hostility that attend the gesture, then what’s the way forward? There’s no single path, of course. But in many of the standout works that have emerged from this scene, young women—in registers of resigna-tion or defiance, didactically or through performing the intertwinements of “sexuality, innocence, darkness, complacency”—seem to pull off the paradoxical feat of taking back their images at the very moment of surrender.

Johanna Fateman

Originally published in Artforum International, Vol. 53, No. 8, April, 2015

REVIEW Cura Magazine Bunny Rogers

Someone recently said to me, “I bought Bunny’s Self Portrait (Mourning Mop)”. This self-portrait is a mop, the archetypal kind, with the bottom of the mop head dyed a muddy purple, its colour bleeding up the fibres. A listless pink bow is tied around the handle of the mop and hangs down along its length. An inanimate object as the image of the artist is not surprising when one thinks of Bunny’s work – often taking references from childhood films and games – yet this object, in its animism, is the opposite of the flirty duster in Beauty and the Beast. Mourning Mop is placed in the corner, a sad, domestic, silent cry. The thought of someone assuming any sort of ownership of Bunny Rogers’ image feels violent, perhaps because Mourning Mop seems trapped, or hiding in its disposition and placement. It isn’t that acquisition itself is a violent act, but that there is a constant tendency towards self-erasure in Rogers’ practice. And anyone owning Bunny’s ‘self’ appears contradictory to this tendency.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, writer and mystic, active in the ’30s and ’40s, wrote that “the only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.”1 Truth is what we ache for, and truth is a self-sacrificial endeavour.

In 1998 the world’s first CamGirl, Jennifer Ringley (JenniCam) appeared on the Letterman Show in the US. This was one of the internet’s first forays into the collective consciousness of mass popular culture. This was the time when the internet promised a new and certain proximity to others that suggested we were embarking on newer, realer realities. In her interview with Letterman, Ringley stated that her broadcast life was her real life, was truth. The failure of the internet’s early promise – that the realer reality provided was in fact simply the systematic enclosure of the net into private space (Barbrook & Cameron), continuing the same primitive accumulation and homogenisation that has exponentially increased throughout Western history – this failure left us looking for other paths to truths and realities.2

Following from Mark Fisher and others, the start of the 21st century gave us the death of count-er-culture, and has landed us with Normcore as a quasi-accelerationist proposition that a new path to subversion or refusal can be trodden when one is continually fungible and always fitting in. A body as HFT algorithm. This is a trend or version of self-actualisation that is prefixed on being present and always assimilating.

It is here where Bunny Rogers’ work pivots away from trend. The art world looks to quarantine artists into their generations and supposed neologisms and, yes, Rogers’ is the first generation to come of age online (she was born in 1990). Her work is not specific to a medium, since she makes sculpture, installation, video, animation, etc., but rather is produced at certain points through digital processes (3D modelling, video editing, Second Life photography) and is in part exhibited and distributed through the internet. However Rogers’ preoccupation is not about finding 2.0 editions of self-actualisation, instead it embodies a grimly transcendental view similar to Weil’s, which seeks a form of annihilation as a supplier of intimacy and truthfulness in self-removal.

This truthfulness, this removal, is of course created through representations, fictions, ‘acting’, even. As the artist herself said in a Facebook status update: “Performing yourself should fit like a well-tai-lored suit. Should feel loose in the shoulders, should feel natural stop conflating acting with insin-cerity as if honesty exists” (March 2014).

Why can’t Bunny be owned? Because her art becomes the tool of self-annihilation. The pain of truth, of never reaching truth, operates in her work as the more surreal, the more ‘profound’, alternative to art’s ubiquitous forms of self-actualisation and even critique of self-actualisation.

From her Self Portrait (Mourning Mop) to walking amongst her four-room exhibition at Société, Columbine Library (2014), where three of the rooms featured voice and cartoon versions of Bunny,

we are given affective hints of the artist herself, from behind a screen of eerie distance, offering up references as incidental objects within platforms that appear as desolate space once they are oc-cupied by her ambiguous works. Rogers’ works are never in conversation, but instead they operate as ghostly half echoes of one another.

In Columbine Library we encounter a series of self-portraits, Portraits as Clone of Jeanne d’Arc (from the 2002-2003 cartoon series Clone High, which featured a clone of the woman burnt at the stake by the church and then loved and sainted once she was dead, when she became memory) depicting not an obvious self-representation, but a similar-to-Bunny, similar to the Clone High char-acter image of a CGI girl.

Throughout the self-portraits the character continues the cover-up – Joan dresses up as other characters such as Grizabella from musical Cats and Vanessa (the seductive form that Ursula be-comes) from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. In one self-portrait Bunny/Joan is holding a Spooky Food (an item from Neopets – one of Rogers’ favourite childhood games), its colours have been changed and the polka dots made irregular, to give the Spooky Food an ‘emo’ appearance in keeping with the Elliott Smith tags that appear on the Clone State Bookcase piece in another room of the show.3 In another self-portrait her mouth is covered by a Death’s- head Hawkmoth, a moth we have seen before in the promotional image for Silence of the Lambs; the representation of self is now bound as a Bunny/Joan/Jodi (Foster).

Across another two rooms Bunny’s voice is present even as her image becomes further removed. Two video works present animations of re-enacted spaces of the Columbine High School Massa-cre: the Columbine library and cafeteria. There is a CGI character in each space (Joan of Arc in the library and Gazlene Membrane from Invader Zim in the cafeteria), reading poems from Cunny Poem Vol.1 – Rogers’ first anthology of her poetry. And it is the slow sad voice of the artist that is delivered through the colourful animations, themselves situated in pre-emptive scenes of horror.

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.” (Weil)

Bunny is online, behind a string of found objects: memories and references from childhood. It is this state of memory which further serves to function as an erasure. Her works are shells of has-beens, and this is exemplified not only stylistically at times (such as her meryn.ru site, standing clearly in html, referencing a ‘1.0’ internet), but also in the narratives within the works themselves – a 15 year old High School massacre, a derelict shop:

Hello friends,As of February 2nd 2012 another establishment is being built where our storestands and we regret to inform you that we have decided to shut down forever.Initially we attempted to move within the Forest Hills area but we could notfind something both affordable and adequate.[. . .]This store is all we’ve ever known.[. . .]Thanks for the memories.- The entire Sister Unn’s family

Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski, Sister Unn’s, 2012

I think this is where I first came across Bunny Rogers work – online, probably through Facebook, leading me to sister-unns.com. Sister Unn’s, by Rogers and Olszewski, was a total work of art comprised of an empty shop and website, that made up both documentation and narrative itself. The shop was filled with dying roses, a lit fridge at the back containing a rose in a glass container on a table. Again we are reminded of Beauty and the Beast, yet it’s bleaker, more mournful, there’s less potential for rebirth. The site presented pictures of the shop-installation and a digital rose gallery – when you go to the site you are allocated a rose for the (online) gallery. In this work we

aren’t taken back in time anywhere, we are shown the present as a tomb, as memories rather than actions. When I first visited sister-unns.com there was about a webpage’s width of roses, I just visited the site again and had a long scroll to reach the bottom; past visitors have accumulated and left a trace.

There are some clear statements by Rogers’ as to why all this effacement, and I guess talking about them doesn’t necessarily fit into the standard art-historical mode of talking about art, where objectivity is academicism and that we’d rather something clean and intellectual – an artwork that talks about art. But these memories and signifiers of childhood aren’t just about ‘nostalgia’ or a ‘lost innocence’; they point to something much darker and more real. In other works with Olszewski, for the exhibition If I Die Young at 319 Scholes (2013), Rogers has taken images from Russian ‘child modelling’ sites, and erased them completely, filling over everything except the logo and URL of the site with a dull colour, and printing these digital works as a series of blankets. This is erasure as protection, a clear statement from the artists regarding paedophilia.

Bunny Rogers sees “a lot of overlap in mass culture’s sexualisation and exploitation of children and animals.”4 For Rogers, the object-subject and human-non-human relationships are privy to the same long-term culturing, hierarchical power and exploitation, which is why she can take things that are apparently banal and use them in place of her self-image to make ‘irreverent’ objects qui-etly show pain and sorrow, and can do so very acerbically.

For me this exactly summarises Rogers’ approach, refusing universalism in favour of interacting agencies for the creation of (non-neutral) art objects. The works appear as loosely connected ob-jects, her ‘true-self’ given through them, through narrative, and in doing so through her own erasure – you don’t read into the works, Rogers’ approach allows for the story and thus the intention to be read, if we choose to really read, to find truth in the fiction. If we decide we do not want easy art. When you’re buying a Rogers’, you’re not buying her, or an image of her, but rather a little death, a memory in place of the self.5

Rósza Zita Farkas

Originally published in Cura Magazine Issue 19, March, 2015

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1. Simone Weil, Human Personality in Simone Weil An Anthology, ed. by Sian Miles. New York: Grove Press, 1986, pp. 49-78.2. http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-ideology-2/3. Elliott Smith was a music artist who died young and mysteriously from stab wounds in 2003.4. Bunny Rogers Artist Profile, Louis Doulas, May 2012, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/15/artist-profile-bunny-rogers/(accessed 07/11/13).5. ‘little death’ taken from the title Little Deaths, an essay by Sandra Lahire for ‘Make’ magazine, 1999.

REVIEW

Flash ArtBunny Rogers

In 2009, Brigid Mason produced a painting titled Saudades (Our Chair is the Same). The painting depicts two wooden chairs, one pink and one green, woven together at a front corner by the wicker of their seats. This image has since recurred frequently in Bunny Rogers’s art practice. It was 3-D printed in miniature for Jasper Spicero’s “Open Shape” series in January 2013; was fabricated in full for the Rhizome event “Internet as Poetry” at Issue Project Room, New York, in July 2014; and has been echoed in the composition of reproductions of Columbine High School chairs (Clone State Chairs, 2014) in the artist’s “Columbine Library” exhibition at Société in Berlin, which closed in September this year. When 3-D printed, the chairs are connected by shared plastic. When fab-ricated fullsize, thus far the most faithful to Mason’s image, it is the woven fiber of the wicker that connects them. The chairs that appeared in “Columbine Library” were not physically connected, but were paired and positioned in the same manner as in the original painting, and they were con-nected, perhaps, by the idea itself. Illustrations of chairs by Mason flow through Rogers’s recently published archive of poems, Cunny Poem: Vol. 1, alongside portraits of Mason and Rogers.

That a work by another artist should offer the entry point into Rogers’s practice might at first seem derivative. Instead, it is a clue with which we can begin to unravel the multiple connections that populate her art. Rogers works or has worked closely with a cast of collaborators such as Elliot Spence, Spicero, Filip Olszewski and Leo Fortelius-Moring, as well as Mason. The hermetic logic that breeds self-identification with a character like Joan (from the discontinued TV series Clone High, which aired for only one season between 2002 and 2003), into whom Rogers has superim-posed her subjectivity in a series of fifteen self-portraits, becomes a type of precision among fellow perpetrators.

Rogers became known online for her provocative and honest portrayals of self, developing an art practice that has since expanded into the gallery space through a deft and carefully labored devotion to handrendered sculptural objects: clay herons, dyed roses, beaded bags, blankets. Recently, she has instigated a shift in her practice toward outsourced fabrication, employing in one work (Clone State Bookcase, 2014) a furniture company in Wisconsin to produce a more than life-size replica of the Columbine High School library bookcase, stacked with 168 Limited-Edition Elliott Smith plush dolls — soft toy caricatures of the late singer-songwriter modeled on a marshmal-low food item from the game Neopets. Italian theorist Maurizio Lazzarato has claimed that, within contemporary capitalism, a company no longer produces just a product or service, but produces a world. Artists make worlds too, and Rogers’s attention to detail runs beyond her characters and into the types of clothing and furniture that socialize them.

Do two chairs tied together make a world? Worlds happen when they are reproduced, and there is a logic of reproduction implicit in Rogers’s identification and repetition of certain symbols, just like there is a logic of reproduction inherent in the advertising strategies of the company that wants us to wear a certain T-shirt or install a certain operating system. What happens in this moment is the reproduction of not just an image, but an array of material and linguistic signifiers that combine to create this image. The meaning of an image happens in the connections between these distinct but cooperating entities. Where Rogers positions herself as an artist is in this holistic reproduction of the image as a world, rather than in the image as an isolated or captured moment. Her poems provide the imagery for her artworks, and her artworks provide the worlds for her poems. These are tied together by a relentless portrayal and decentering of self across mainstream social net-working sites as well as the more obscure communities of Second Life, Neopets, Furcadia and other worlds. One thread between two chairs is an accident. Weave these threads together and you have a library.

The word paraphilia describes a condition in which someone’s sexual gratification depends on behavior that is atypical or extreme. Common paraphilias include exhibitionism and voyeurism, but also sexual fantasies or acts involving nonhuman objects. Rogers’s work has from an early

stage explored the complex relationship between the strength and vulnerability of the young female subject under the voyeuristic, predominantly male gaze. Plushophilia is the term attributed to para-philias involving stuffed animals. Autoplushophilia is a term suggested by American psychologist and sexologist Dr. Anne Lawrence to refer to sexual arousal that depends on imagining oneself as a plush toy.

Rogers’s work often attempts to dislocate straightforward connections between sexuality and de-sire. She will sexualize the non-sexual or desexualize the sexual to disrupt simple assumptions. The world that she creates in an exhibition like “Columbine Library,” and the worlds of her objects at large, is one that attempts to complicate power structures under the hegemonic male gaze while refusing to submit to this gaze. Plushophilia constitutes a nonreproductive sexual relation. Plush-ophiles are sometimes referred to as “plushies,” meaning that both the subject that desires and the object that is desired can have the same name. As Rogers incorporates a wider array of out-sourced production techniques and furniture design into her practice, alongside her more haptic craft-based objects, she continually questions ideas of who or what has agency in her multifaceted installations, and who or what things might form relationships that create this agency. Rogers’s work doesn’t suggest any resolution to these connections. She brings them into her world as sug-gestions, perhaps, of avenues out of our current shared ways of structuring reality. She challenges the means of her own reproduction.

Performance, text, video, object and embroidery overlap in Rogers’s practice to question common assumptions of identity and the identity of objects. In the cover artwork to her recent book of poetry My Apologies Accepted (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2014), which features two illustrated portraits by Brad Phillips, Bunny is portrayed sitting with her back to the camera (we assume it’s a camera but it might just be our eyes).Perhaps it is not the act of looking but the system of looking that in-duces the paraphilia. In front of her, on the wall, is a ribbon. She is sitting on a single chair. Every portrait is a betrayal.

Harry Burke

Originally published on http://www.flashartonline.com/article/bunny-rogers/, November, 2014

REVIEW

Art ReviewBunny Rogers Columbine Library

The Columbine High School massacre happened a little over 15 years ago, on 20 April 1999. Having killed 13 people and injured 23, and planted dozens of explosive devices throughout the Colorado high school campus, shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have been historicised – and sometimes idolized – as the progenitors of now-commonplace high school mass shootings. The actions of the pair, who were reported to have identified with goth music, ignited a nationwide moral panic condemning goth culture, all of these events taking place amid the gestation of the social web. Formed in the years following are online communities of people who identify with Harris and Klebold´s perceived struggles and ultimate action against their social alienation. These com-munities, unthinkable in their depersonalisation of the massacre´s victims, fawn over the shooters, obsessing about their actions and the intimate details of that day – right down to the design of the school´s furniture.

Bunny Roger´s exhibition Columbine Library takes the massacre and its reception as its subject, using Y2K-era cartoon characters as surrogates for the identities of Harris and Klebold, as well as for the artist herself. The videos Poetry Reading in Columbine Library with Joan of Arc and Poetry Reading in Columine Library with Gaz (all works 2014) feature cartoon characters reading rather morbid poetry written by the artist, Joan of Arc of Clone High representing Dylan Klebold and Gaz of Invader Zim representing Eric Harris. In their respective cartoon shows, Joan of Arc reads “I want a fine arts valentine / One that´s steady and that´s true / I want a fine arts valentine / I spend so much time in school / When I look around me / All I see is kids / Kids I´d like to spend the day with / Kids I´d like to eat a meal with / It´s hard in school / To know your boundaries…” That two female characters from cancelled mid-noughties cartoons stand in for Harris and Klebold is obviously a stretch. Yet Rogers connects them by an uncanny, implicit logic: both are subjects upon which many projects glorifications or condemnations of teenage angst and social alienation that we so often experience through the screen. Roger´s exhibition illustrates the collectively shared, personal desire to connect with others who suffer from social alienation – how it is massproduced in society, and felt personally.

Further works in Columbine Library include Clone State Bookcase, a lifesize replica of a Columbine High School library bookcase filled with custom-produced plush toys recalling an item found on the gaming website Neopets, festooned with what Rogers terms mourning ribbons and appropriately titled Elliot Smith after the deceased singer. In an adjacent room lie replicas of massacre-era and revamped versions of Columbine High School chairs, draped with either custom-produced back-packs sporting velour roses and hand-beaded patches of Gaz´s and Joan of Arc´s faces of duffel bags inspired by those in which Harris and Klebland hid bombs. These saccharine-looking duffel bags are also strewn ominously throughout the gallery, including under the viewing benches (also produced in this institutional Columbine style) in Société´s screening rooms. Less remarkable are a series of framed, 3D-rendered self portraits as Clone High´s Joan of Arc in various poses.

While angst and social alienation are certainly not new topics of artistic inquiry, one can hand it to Rogers for coming up with a new way in which to understand how we seek to communalise psy-chological suffering in our formative years, and how this has been amplified by the emergence of online communities. However, is does come off as a missed opportunity that Rogers has rooted this exhibition´s aesthetic in the relatively slick mass-produced object, whereas her past, handmade, awkward and haptic works more accurately depict the earnestly felt personal grief of the masspro-duced Mournings.

Karen Archey

Originally published on http://artreview.com/reviews/october_2014_bunny_rogers/, October, 2014

REVIEW

FriezeBunny Rogers

Fifteen years ago, in the corridors, classrooms, cafeteria and library of Columbine High School in Colorado, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold fatally shot one teacher and 12 fellow students and injured 24 more before taking their own lives. Since that day, many have speculated about the killers’ mo-tives: were Harris and Klebold sociopathic loners, or disenchanted and misdirected young men? The media, for its part, largely depicted the atrocity as a simplified narrative of villains and victims.

In ‘Columbine Library’, Bunny Rogers’s recent solo exhibition at Société, the young American artist offered a more complex reading of the event. Rogers was nine years old at the time of the shooting, and she uses the massacre to frame a series of works that reflect on her own biography as well as comprising a broader study of collective memory. For Clone State Bookcase (all works 2014) Rogers replicated the Columbine library’s bookshelves but filled them with stuffed toys bearing a cartoon likeness of the singer Elliott Smith. Rogers floods the seemingly innocuous with misplaced symbolism: the bookshelves may look unremarkable or generic, but they replicate items that were present at the site of slaughter; cutesy consumer items are transformed into an homage to a mu-sician whose suicide made him an idol for disaffected youth. Rogers is often drawn to figures and objects overburdened with symbolism, and here she uses them to great effect as emblems for adolescent alienation.

In Clone State Chairs and State Skool Chairs, Rogers remade both the old and new versions of students’ chairs from Columbine (the school’s furniture was redesigned post-shooting), underneath which she stashed custom-made bags based on those that the killers used to carry their explo-sives. These works, which replicate objects from before and after the shooting, symbolize the dual impulse that occurs during a period of grief, when the mourner becomes caught between the urge to memorialize and the need to forget, to build monuments and to move on. Rogers fixes her atten-tion on the small, seemingly banal details to articulate a moment of collective trauma.

Clone State Bench and State Skool Bench served as seating for two synced animated films. In Po-etry Reading in Columbine Cafeteria with Gazlene Membrane, a character from the cartoon series Invader Zim (2001–02) stands on a tabletop reciting poems from Rogers’s book Cunny Poem Vol. 1 (2014) as the animated school canteen gradually fills with water from overhead sprinklers. The scene is based on eyewitness accounts of the aftermath of the shooting, adding a tragic backdrop to the character’s emo-grimace and teenage ennui. The poetry she reads is full of lyrical aphorisms, at turns nihilistic and narcissistic: ‘With people, feelings are muddy …’ In the next room, Poetry Reading in Columbine Library with Joan of Arc continues the recital, in which the reader’s truncated statements conflate emotionalism with flippancy, while death, loneliness, mourning and unrequited love are recurring motifs.

Aside from the well-known scenery in which they appear, the characters and references in Rog-ers’s films and poems can feel hermetic, overdetermined by the artist’s biography. There is a curious elision between overwrought emotionalism and something more authentically personal. Vulnerability and toxicity, sentimentality and flippancy: Rogers is skilful at muddying these regis-ters. ‘Columbine Library’ offered a complex entanglement of the personal and public; throughout, Klebold and Harris were absent – intimated but never enunciated – suggesting that though we may attempt to find motives and fix memories in objects and images, they remain elusive.

George Vasey

Originally published in Frieze, Issue 166, September, 2014

REVIEW

ARTFORUMBunny Rogers

In her latest exhibition, “Columbine Library,” Bunny Rogers refers to the 1999 massacre at Colum-bine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Dark subjects aren’t new for Rogers: Themes such as lost innocence, angst at the end of childhood, and untimely death frequently inhabit her practice, in which she navigates chat rooms, gaming communities, and other online activities designed for but not exclusively used by prepubescent girls. Her own preteen obsessions, particularly with Neopets, often appear in her work—cutiefied artifacts from a life lived online.

Clone State Bookcase (all works 2014), a replica of a Columbine High bookcase, is stocked with plush dolls of singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, the tormented musician who succumbed to addiction and depression in 2003. Black ribbons embossed with an image of a bull are draped from the shelves (Smith had a Ferdinand the Bull tattoo on his arm). Opposite, Clone State Chairs features two velvet backpacks bearing cartoon characters—Joan of Arc of Clone High and Gaz of Invader Zim—on two chairs joined at an angle. Seven vestiges in Self Portraits on a wall cast the artist as a digital character.

A video installation spread across two rooms shows a digital animation of Joan of Arc and Gaz in the reimagined loci of the massacre, the high school’s library and cafeteria, reading from Rogers’s collected poems, Cunny Poem Vol. 1, dubbed in her own sticky, affectless voice. The net of refer-ences to Rogers’s universe of motifs (wilted flowers, ribbons, joint chairs, fan articles) can intrigue or alienate. We’ve entered a stage where the performance is always on, fusing online and IRL, and coalescing meticulous theatrics with crushing candor.

Hili Person

Originally published on http://artforum.com/picks/id=47872, August, 2014

REVIEW

AQNBBunny Rogers @ Société reviewed

People say that an artist’s intent is beside the point, but sometimes the intent is the only point worth taking. Artist Bunny Rogers‘ aesthetic isn’t for everyone, but it is conscious and significant, and that meant something to me. A few days into the exhibition, I biked over to Société, a small gallery space tucked into a nondescript pre-war building by Tiergarten, to take a look her latest show, Columbine Library.

All four of the gallery’s rooms are populated by the exhibition, each inspired by the now-infamous Columbine High School Massacre of 1999. In the first room, a public school-style library bookcase stretches diagonally across an empty room, each side stuffed with plushy Neopet toys staring blankly from their shelves. “The bookshelf is an exact replica of the one in the Columbine library,” a gallerist tells me. Bunny had found the images of the high school online and re-created accord-ingly. “Well,” he adds, “this one is bigger, but close enough.” It is eerie, seemingly senseless, but when I’m told the toys were created by Bunny herself and born of a childhood obsession, the aesthetic of the exhibition quietly comes into focus. Looking closer, I see that each toy bears a unique “Elliott Smith” tag, for the “Shooting Star” singer, as well as a ribbon depicting the gentle, flower-smelling bull from The Story of Ferdinand that Smith wore tattooed on his arm. “She’s ob-sessed with him,” says the gallerist later, but doesn’t elaborate.

In the adjoining room are two sets of chairs, huddled in pairs on opposite sides of the room and adorned with velvety, hand-made backpacks and flower-embellished tubular purses. On the back-packs are depictions of cartoon characters from childhood cartoons, Joan of Arc of Clone High across one, Gaz of Invader Zim across another. On one of the walls, seven ghostly “self-portraits” hang suspended on the walls, depicting a cartoon-like Bunny holding a Neo-pet sadly, Bunny with icicle hands and a purple heart, Bunny with her mouth covered by a butterfly.

Without context, the room seems meaningless, unsettling, the iconic references jarring and ill fitting alongside one another. But once the context begins to materialize – that of innocence lost, chil-dren’s backpacks exploding with home-made bombs, the bleeding personal narrative of Bunny’s own childhood juxtaposed against the tragedy of the shooting – the exhibition’s kitschy hollow-ness takes on another meaning. What had felt incomplete, unrehearsed, becomes a meandering through the cultural icons and symbolic figures of lost childhood.

In the last and final part of the exhibition are two adjoining rooms, each bearing a video installation, synced with one another meant to be in a constant loop depicting each of the two cartoon charac-ters standing before the re-imagined spaces of the Columbine Massacre – the empty, disheveled cafeteria standing silently under exploding sprinklers; two armchairs before a curtain in a dark, mossy room – reading from Bunny’s latest poetry collection, Cunny Vol. 1. The videos loop for 20 minutes, the affectless drone of Bunny’s voice feeding through the cartoon mouths. I focus in and out of the videos, and when I tune back in, I hear Bunny’s voice say “looking for something to lighten up the dark corner / company at the foot of your bed to garble your griefings” and feel instinctively what the exhibition is about.

Eva Folks

Originally published on http://www.aqnb.com/2014/08/01/bunny-rogers-societe-reviewed/, Au-gust, 2014

REVIEW

SPF 100Bunny Rogers Ryder Ripps R. Lord }{ American Medium

In any structure of architecture, or form, there are a number of parts and identities, though they each turn to the most basic functions and components. The arch, that is the excavation and hol-lowness which allows for a new fullness, the column, the wall veil, and more miniscule components such as the cornice or dripstone – those being the capital.

Though, we must turn our attention here to a particular component of architecture – an often pleas-ingly visual component, the arch. If we take Ruskin at his word, the Greeks invented the column (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. and variations on each theme), the Romans the arch (that grand Trium-phant Arch of so many Masaccio and Renaissance painters), and the Arab pointed and foliated the arch – its ogee drawing lines between the taller apogee and lower perigee. This caste, or his-torically-progressive exclusion of the past, is specific to any analysis of structure and form, and for our purposes we will look at poetry. Specifically, that of three poets who are most formative to our contemporary moment: Bunny Rogers, Ryder Ripps, and Rachel (R.) Lord.

The three poets cum artists/artists cum poets were enlisted by the latter, R Lord, to read at Ameri-can Medium – a Bed Stuy gallery founded in 2012 and showing artists such as Ann Hirsch, Andrew Norman Wilson, Jon Rafman, Kareem Lotfy, et al. The three read short, specific passages from new books (Rogers), recent musings (Ripps), and memories in the form of myth (Lord). For such a moment of poetry, there could not have been a different, yet potent triumvirate of poets to read.

Rogers poetry reflects much of her visual artwork, most recently on view at Société in Berlin, in that it is meticulously refined, melancholic, and yet deeply and joyously respectful. During Roger’s reading I found myself looking over onto adjacent brownstones, not particularly due to her deadpan delivery, but because her words change the physical environment into monstrous, darkly hilarious visions that threaten to attack their found environment, but instead smile inside. Window blinds and porch covers became white and green-striped teeth that held their serious position, but were approachable in a masculine-defined role that only Qiu Miaojin or Rogers could particularly under-stand. It is a kind severity that could attack, but would rather guard and protect in an elliptical path, highs and lows smoothed into the svelte, lovely vicious curve of a panther.

Ripps, on the verso, would rather forwardly attack with the ironic curve. It is not a demeaning or dastardly attack, but every episode or thought that leaves his lips instantly makes the thought irrel-evant. To say Ripps’ words and writings were some of the funniest heard in contemporary poetry would be an understatement. There is a direct dryness that even supersedes Rogers delivery, one could say a tiredness, but Ripps is energetic and confident about his time that he embodies, and the dump.fm cofounder would rightly show this confidence in the in/originality of death driven inten-sity in the repetition of image and word. Further, Ripps recognizes that insincerity has passed and the letters he utters are not those of personalized, failed thoughts, but addresses to those still living behind the moment: “Do not go this route,” is the warning. Perhaps, like the Roman arch, Ripps most finds that he is stuck in this beautiful transition. There is a grand understanding of the past and a well-invisioned path of the future, but the tight beauty he has created may only be of this moment.

R. (Rachel) Lord – though she specifically stipulates she prefers to keep the forenames separate for textual and visual mediums, respectively – was the most anomalous, possibly basic?!, poet of the evening. For starters, I refer to the confused basic not in the contemporaneously demeaning definition of the word, but in the Doric definition. Lord’s poetry, pointedly being the delivery, was traditional, formalist poetry. She referenced her childhood in D.C. as an atypical myth of childhood – seeing it in her present as she imagined the present. Narrative at its surface, Lord left a feeling of well-crafted conceptualism, possibly more wrought than the two before her. I left confused on Lord’s performance. I did not understand it, however on leaving my thoughts were milled on past explorations of excavating the present. It may be trite, but would turning to Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations be so wrong? Lord dug out the past in a lucid, determined desire so as to make it

relevant for the future. If any, she was the poet who made the past, not the present, the most plea-surable and understandable by future archaeologists. Perhaps, by her rather sing-song tone and delivery, I was distracted to the past with all her content, and obscured to the real meaning of it. Like I said, I left damned confused with her work. It did just not fit in.That is wonderful.

Often times I leave a night of readings with a “yes, those were good,” or “yes, those were quite good and some quite bad,” – the bad referring to just desiring of more work and attention. However, there is no doubt that each of the three readers at American Medium were exquisitely skilled in reading, poetry, and the desirable beauty of art. No one I have talked to has said one harming thing against Rogers’s art. It is seriously exquisite.

If I could imagine them all, then I would find Rogers the most crafted and poignant to the near contemporary, that being sincere and direct, her writing most reflective of the form of Internet linguistics. Her politically and sexually charged distances become ready mades for the damning solitariness of our internet sociality. She transverses the highs and lows, that Ogee arch, in her excavations of the present and I find myself crying in joy to see her work.

Ripps does not demand laughter, though he could and many would oblige. As the Ionic, he has progressed in an ahistorical phormat – determined in his stature, and flowering in easily-read com-edy. It is the reprieve from the non-ironic nature of capitalism that Ripps makes one lift their head from the doldrums. Forgive his large rhinestone cowboy buckle belt, it only adds to the hilarious-ness that one needs to look to for understanding our absurdity in contemporary movements – dump.fm and Red Bull are his corpocratic toys.

Lord, I admittedly still do not understand. She danced in the pit of dirt that was the American Medium backyard, swaying back and forth as she read each of her poems, as if each was a cho-reographed performance. Considering the venue and preceding readers, I cannot but assume this was Lord’s intent – she was a most basic conceptualist that levered thoughts past traditional poetry reading. I need to hear her read again. I need to read her writings. Her Angry Birds paintings, con-troversially denied by a notorious art flipper, were adamantly base, and yet so complexly visionary that it is understandable they were not bought. Do we possibly have the foresight to understand Lord’s poetry and work at the moment? Using Betteridge’s law, we must say yes to the question, but it is damning tribulation to undertake. I only hope that I did not perversely overthink her writing due to the two poets before her. May we say she is the Doric? The original and most traditional, but privileged for increasingly complex developments.

Bryan Jarrisson

Originally published on http://spf1hundred.blogspot.de/2014/08/bunny-rogers-ryder-ripps-r-lord.html, August, 2014

INTERVIEW

RhizomeArtist Profile: Bunny Rogers

A lot of your work seems to explore the transitional moments of adolescence into adulthood through sexual introductions like Dotyk and Waiting for Anne, as well as through sentimental mementos like the embroidered letterman jackets of Sister Jackets and even the webpage Dad’s Big Socks. With this type of memorialization, there’s also this recurrent fascination with animals as self-identifying symbols: Bunny Rogers, Pones, A Very Young Rider, Lambslut, etc. I wonder where these animal identities intersect with this loss of naïve youth and what your relationship to them is within these transgressive adolescent shifts? Why concentrate on the prepubescent stage? What role do ani-mals play within this shift?

I am interested in deconstructing the comfort felt regarding how we view the transition from girlhood to adulthood. I do not think I concentrate on the prepubescent stage, at least in the biological sense of the word. When my work is categorized with that term it sets up a discussion of a social-ly-familiar understanding of what [female] prepubescence means, the definition of which is con-fusing and contradictory. We build value systems based on that understanding. These terms are applied in an assessment of my work and me. Some of my works try to make these terms unstable, by questioning how we arrive at them. The challenge is how to broaden the grounds on which these concepts are positioned as is evident by the limitations of phrasing we have even when trying to in-terpret the works investigating these concerns. I see a lot of overlap in mass culture’s sexualization and exploitation of children and animals. i.e.

This area of conversation (which the above videos are a part of) is one I want to expand upon.

Since 2008 you’ve been using Twitter to archive every Facebook status update you’ve made, ren-dering your Twitter account as regurgitory. Twitter has a 140 limit while Facebook’s is 63,206. By archiving with Twitter you have to make a conscious decision on your Facebook to keep within this 140 limit. This works out for you as your updates are generally a word or a sentence long. How do your status updates inform or continue your process of performance? Are they related at all?

I have never been able to consistently maintain an up-to-date private journal in the traditional way that I know them to be – physical or online, despite wanting to and believing in the relevance of personal recordkeeping. As a kid I enjoyed re-reading and analyzing old diary entries while enter-taining the fantasy of dying young and leaving behind evidence of my perceived precociousness and unparalleled imagination. In this way there has always been an audience in mind. I still relate to these feelings but I have gained a desire to share and connect with greater immediacy. Building a public archive is one way in which I am able to realize aspects of these motivations.

As a tribute to the Rego Park flower shop and homage to the two characters in the novel, The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas, Sister Unn’s was a flower shop run by you and Filip Olszewski in Forest Hills Queens. The shop seems to have caught much of the local resident’s attention; curious and confused about its purpose and intention. A gallery is always immediately recognized as a space for art, but with Sister Unn’s this context is obfuscated. What were some of your intentions surround-ing this allegorical intervention?

To build a house of worship

“True love is a rose behind glass

It’s locked and kept closed”

Grieving over someone, something and someplace are central themes found throughout your body of work. Could you talk more about the process of mourning and what it means to make it a focal point in your work?

I think some things you get over and some you do not. I disagree that mourning is a finite experi-ence (the ‘mourning period’). There are beliefs that there is a correct way or length of time to grieve the death of a loved one, yet it is popular and accepted to say, “you never really get over your first love.” This is a telling convergence of values that has informed a number of my magical artistic creations.

Your entire online identity seems to culminate in an ongoing performance and I wonder where you differentiate between acting and a more consolidated separate persona? I’m also wondering how your online and offline performances such as 9years and Dotyk allow for playful, childlike gender representation or to what degree they reinforce them?

It is freeing to be able to have subtle shifts between doing online works, presenting documentation of work, and connecting with like-minded people. I really enjoy working online because I can inter-act with a variety of audiences that are not easily accessible otherwise.

Age: Beautiful

Location: NY, NY

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

AOL Kids’ art forums were deeply impactful and inspiring. I began making drawings in MS Paint around this time (~1997). Neopets personal pet pages motivated me to learn how to build a website (~2000). LiveJournal was a space in which I could more fully immerse myself into alt characters and identities via creative fiction (~2001).

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

Out of need

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I received my BFA from Parsons the New School for Design.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

Yes

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community or-ganizing)?

I write poetry. I am learning to play piano. I like making soups, baking.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

Hand beading jobs, pretzel twisting.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Elliott Smith, my greatest loveFilip Olszewski, my greatest teacherBen Kellogg, my highschool sweetheartBrigid Mason, my museShawn Jeffers, mein bruder und geistMy parents, my heroes

Shoutout to Eric S. Oresick!!!

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

I have roped Ben Kellogg into a heavy investment and we should have something to show for it Fall 2012.Filip Olszewski and I have made a lot of work together (most recently, Sister Unn’s). He is also the photographer behind much of my photograph-dependent work. (i.e. The Ice Garden)Arielle Gavin and I made a video.Many performances with Shawn Jeffers.

Do you actively study art history?

http://iamachild.wordpress.com/http://pigtailsinpaint.wordpress.com/That about covers it.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Rarely.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

No.

Louis Doulas

Originally published on http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/15/artist-profile-bunny-rogers/, May, 2014

REVIEW

FriezeLonely Girl

If 2007 saw the resurgence of feminist art via the exhibition ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolu-tion’, it seems already like a moment disanalogous with our own. How is it that, 41 years after the artist-run space Womanhouse and two decades after the dawn of Riot Grrrl, that a male curator was able to publish a press release leading with this line: ‘Martos Gallery is pleased to present Lonely Girl, a group show consisting of seven female artists, all under the age the age of 30’? Is the inclusion of young female artists in contemporary art exhibitions still so rare that their gender and age should be the first, and implicitly most important, fact about a show? Or did the curator – writer and artist Asher Penn – simply throw his arms up admitting his exhibition’s implicit fetishism? Even more fraught was Martos Gallery’s full-page advert in the September issue of Artforum featuring not a photograph of an art work in the show, but the faces of all the artists involved.

The show featured Al Baio, Petra Cortright, Maggie Lee, Greem Jellyfish, Bunny Rogers, Analisa Teachworth and Amalia Ulman – artists who are well-known online, often working in both Inter-net-based as well as physical mediums. Cortright, for one, has carved a place in new media art history for her video VVEBCAM (2007), which features the artist doing what we all did best at the height of Web 2.0: staring at ourselves on the screen, screwing around with buttons and cam effects. Penn writes, ‘Self-portraiture (aka “the selfie”) is so much a part of both [the artists’] art works as well as the documentation of their lives, that it is often difficult to distinguish which one is which.’ Right on. Penn duly points out that the performance of self online can be so produced and even parodying that it could be considered a creative practice in itself, though the art world has yet to develop the frameworks through which to understand such endeavours. And while the selfie is not a gender-specific phenomenon as the exhibition’s all-female line-up suggests (cf. the work of Brian Droitcour, Steve Roggenbuck, Michael Manning), young female self-portraiture is often plati-tudinized as dangerous territory in which feminine vanity will overtake a project’s conceptual merit.

So it was unfortunate that ‘Lonely Girl’ ignored such fertile ground, containing far fewer screens, selfies or web-based work than one would anticipate from an all-faces-no-art ad. As a whole, the installation bore a rag-tag quality one might expect from emerging artists unaccustomed to show-ing in Chelsea galleries, but the slight, low-production-value work also bears a sensibility that con-sciously reacts to and confronts preconceptions of femininity, often subjugating its tropes. We saw paint sloppily applied onto unprimed cotton, abounding pastel colours, sticker collections, glittery ribbon. In the front space, Greem Jellyfish arranged artefacts on and around a display case related to the made-up, hyperbolically Asian character Hannah Choi. Pinned to a curtain surrounding the display case was a printed-out screenshot noting, assumedly, Choi’s female inspirations: ‘ISA-DORA DUNCUN, YAYOI KUSAMA, NIKKI S LEE, ONO YOKO, CINDY SHERMAN, TRACY EMIN, MARINA ABROMOVIC’ – these purposeful misspellings suggesting an Internet-age faux-naiveté.

Videos by Maggie Lee and Analisa Teachworth provided the exhibition with much-needed com-plexity. Lee’s nine short-but-sweet videos installed on a sticker-covered vintage TV/VCR combo track the artist combatting the banality of the everyday by creating a game out of walking, stomping on things left on the street, liaising with a Garfield doll, or following a woman around a mosh pit (TV87, 2013). Teachworth’s video Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (2013) finds two androgynous lovers with bags over their heads spooning, despondently reciting lines peppered with ennui. Most compelling and elegiac was a wet mop, dyed purple and donning a large bow, installed in a corner and titled Self Portrait (mourning mop) (2013) by Bunny Rogers. Amalia Ulman’s series of diminutive wire sculptures of flowers and children meet, perhaps too eagerly, implicit critiques of slightness and fragility (27 Roses, 9 Butterflies and 6 Girls, all 2013). Cortright’s only work here was Night Heat 8 (2011), a digital painting on satin, sadly omitting the webcam work for which she is best known and which the exhibition desperately needed.

While it seems implicit that one of Penn’s objectives was to circumvent the feminist dogma that an older man – who is, notably, over 30 – can’t curate a group of younger, female artists, he floundered

by both failing to portray the power in online self-representation as a viable artistic practice located in the gallery and by blithely ignoring the politics of the male gaze and predation endemic to such a slippery curatorial endeavour. We need greater representation of young women in contemporary exhibitions, but not at the expense of showcasing the artist, her personality or looks over her work. This insidious debutante ball exhibition model suggests, via its all-female fetishism, that these art-ists should be relegated to consider female, rather than universal, issues – an indefensible position in 2013.

Karen Archey

Originally published in Frieze, Issue 159, November, 2013

INTERVIEW

HyperallergicFleeting Youth, Captured in YouTube Videos and Modeling Photos

Over the past few years, 319 Scholes gallery in Brooklyn has played host to a slew of excellent group shows featuring emerging artists working with the internet and digital technology. The space doesn’t usually host single projects, but their next exhibition will change that. Curated by art critic Gene McHugh, If I Die Young is an installation by artists Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski that appropriates videos and photographs from the internet to investigate the fleetingness of youth as caught through online artifacts.If I Die Young is composed of two sections. In the front gallery, 12 speakers will play YouTube cov-ers of the Band Perry’s “If I Die Young,” a recently popular country song that has become a meme for young girls to cover and post online. Ten custom-made, monochromatic twin blankets will hang in the rear of the space. The color of the blanket is determined by taking the average color of var-ious images from child modeling agencies found online and then sticking the agency’s watermark over the resulting hue, which ranges from blood red to pale pink all the way to black.

In an email Q&A, I talked to McHugh about how the project came to be and what the meme of YouTube song covers means. Hyperallergic is also happy to debut some of the blankets before the show opens tonight at 7 pm. Also, check out the artists’ preview site for the exhibition.

Kyle Chayka: How did you originally discover the work of the two artists, Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski?

Gene McHugh: Another artist told me about Bunny’s work in, I think, 2010 and said she was doing a totally different type of thing, which turned out to be true. I think it all starts from her website, meryn.ru. Before I saw the projects, that domain name seemed so dead-on to me. It was beautiful and mysterious, but sort of funny. Like if you spend a lot of lonely time surfing around online, you come across these weird ‘.ru’ websites. And ‘meryn’ was from fantasy novels or something, which also seemed such a totally perfect encapsulation of the kind of stuff that you see on the internet. And then when you went in, the main thing at the time was her collection of ribbons — breast cancer ribbons, AIDS ribbons, ribbons for other diseases, wars, personal accomplishments, whatever. She organized all of these ribbons that all symbolized something to somebody and they were so crude, but lovely and touching.

I met Filip through Bunny and immediately realized that he, too, was this sort of brilliant, creative guy that New York was lucky to have. His projects, to me, come from a similar position of being online a lot and feeling how the internet very seriously makes you feel so lonely but so connected at the same time, and it’s very difficult to reconcile these feelings. I think for him, being creative is about responding to the world through different means, using materials that seem more relevant to his experience. The blog project he made about Bunny, “Elizabeth Leaving,” is one of the great landmarks of net art.

KC: Was this new project developed specifically for 319 Scholes or did it come out of ongoing work by the artists?

GM: I approached the artists with the idea of doing one simple gesture in the relatively large gal-leries of 319 Scholes, as a sort of turn on the large group shows I’d seen at 319 Scholes over the past couple of years. That was all I had in mind. They came back to me with a fully though out, two-part installation that they had been discussing, in various forms, for several years. I think it’s the perfect fit.

KC: The work seems like it engages a certain YouTube trope, that of the cover song. Could you talk about how that developed and what role YouTube tropes might play in culture?

GM: YouTube cover songs are a distilled example of web culture. The videos hover around these

polarities — beautiful/pathetic, hopeful/hopeless — that often strike viewers as more meaningful than the original, slickly produced tracks. Seeing people’s bedrooms and their personal touches adds to this. When there are lots of these different cover videos of the same song and you click from one to the next until you’ve watched dozens, a hundred different people singing the song, it reaches a critical mass and becomes a different type of cultural experience altogether.

Bunny and Filip were particularly interested in the one featured in the show — young girls singing “If I Die Young” by the Band Perry. They monitored it early on, before it really became a small meme, and started collecting them. Now there are nine hundred or so; the entire mass of young girls sing-ing these lyrics about dying young becomes haunting. The front room of the show, which features a chorus of 12 of these voices that you can listen to individually (by going up to the speakers) or collectively (by standing in the center of the room), captures this.

KC: The blankets in the rear gallery appropriate child modeling agency photos and reduce them to an average color. What’s the impact of that reduction, and what role does preserving the watermark play?

GM: One figure I was thinking about in relation to this show is Richard Prince, who, among other things, rephotographs photographs of media iconography such as the Marlboro Man. To reduce his complex intentions to a couple of lines, he’s asking his viewers to consider the photographs as photographs — objects in the world — as opposed to what the photograph is depicting. He’s not interested in cowboys per se, but pictures of cowboys and the relationships of people to these pictures. I think this is very interesting, and the way he did it was massively important; however, Prince’s work also takes part in the sensationalism that’s implicit in what he photographs.

I don’t know if that’s a critique I have of Prince, but I’m interested in how, in “If I Die Young,” the artists leave a void in place of the image. They use an objective measurement of its content — its average color — and this trace — the watermark — to stand in for the model. If you let yourself really sit and deal with the work for a moment, it becomes devastating. It also foregrounds the wa-termark, which is a widespread but largely invisible part of digital image culture. By looking at the watermarks, you get the whole story.

Originally published in Hyperallergic, March, 2013

REVIEW AQNBBunny Rogers, Hannah Black + the ‘unusuble chaire’

Bunny Rogers‘ voice is unmistakable. Often described as flat or monotone, it is also sublimely expressive. At the opening of her solo exhibition, Columbine Library, at Société in July, Bunny launched Cunny Vol 1, an archive of the poetry she published on her Tumblr, Cunny Poem from 2012-2014. Downstairs from the exhibition space, in a grimy, empty flat, Bunny read from Cunny as if her words bore an unbearable weight. They visibly dragged her down so that by the end of each poem she seems to have to scoop herself back up before beginning the next. She reminds me of a character from a Dame Darcy comic book. Following the reading Joseph Beers performed Bunny’s favourite Elliott Smith song. The atmosphere was drenched in ennui; the acoustic strum-ming, the sticky floor, the black and purple stripes. It was like being in 1999 without nostalgia, as if for the first time.Almost two months later, the show is still open, Bunny has returned from New York with a series of multiples (her “merchandise”) and she is launching the Columbine Library artist’s book. A collabo-ration between herself, artist-writer Hannah Black, animator Elliot Spence, designer Guillaume Mo-jon and editor John Beeson, it is a picture book cloaked in purple camouflage posing as a school exercise book. Inside it is poetry, sad, intelligent and brutal.

Illustrated with a computer generated ‘photo’ series by Spence documenting the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, which Bunny’s show borrows as its ‘backdrop’, the images are slick and clean. Liquid pooling on cafeteria tiles is purple and grey, not red, it could be spilled fruit juice. The omission of gore, damaged humans, has the effect of off-screen violence. Rendered invisible it is felt rather than seen.

The subjects of Columbine Library and its opening ‘Unusuble Chair’ poem are inanimate. Utilitar-ian household objects, often chairs, often stood alone as disused usables, feature repeatedly in Bunny’s work. By turning them into art, by making them beautiful, Bunny renders these ordinarily expendable objects indispensable. She offers them value but not use. With her text, Hannah allows the Columbine chairs to speak, she gives them desires, she traces their convoluted agency. “They lie on their backs for the first time and hold their limbs to the ceiling … set free into uselessness, they will become…trash.” They’re offered meaning.

When I first saw Bunny Rogers’ ‘SELF PORTRAIT (MOURNING MOP)‘ (2013), I thought immedi-ately of a scene from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in which two of the fairy godmothers have a wand fight over the colour of Beauty’s debutante dress. An oblique, perhaps unintentional, but important reference, Hannah writes, “The old world is blue and real and imaginary, and the new world is pink and real and imaginary. At the corners they melt into each other, but the word love is fatally contaminated by violence.” At the climax of the magical, fairy godmother tussle, the dress is left ruined, stained pink and blue.

To quote Wangechi Mutu, “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male”. This statement resonates throughout Bunny’s body of work, and significantly in this exhibition of which she has described her choice of subject matter to Harry Burke as “research into social absorption of the Columbine Massacre registered as a complex puzzle necessitating sub-jective assembly”. Hannah reiterates this sentiment as devastating poetry, “They all look basically the same – only the marks of use differentiate them… The marks of use and boredom.” In the story of White America, is the Columbine Massacre a fairytale, yet?

At the book launch, Hannah Black is reading. We return to the same abandoned flat underneath Société, but this time we file into a front room. Here the walls are bright, the floorboards look fresh, it is Sunday afternoon and the sun is out. Hannah’s words spin you off to other places, but you are in no doubt that you are with her in the room, hearing her words. She reads with a rare ease of presence, engaged in the present. This afternoon it is unmistakably 2014.

Writing this review, I am keenly aware of my desire to reference Hannah and Bunny not only as artists, but also as bodies. I recall a point that Elvia Wilk made at a recent Goldrausch Talk Series, ‘The Thing with Images’, that, at least anecdotally, when one searches for a woman artist online the query will almost always return pages of links to images of the artist herself, whereas an image search of a male artist’s name will show up pictures of his work. One only needs a basic feminist analysis to understand how being seen primarily as an image/body is one site at which women (not exclusively) are vulnerable to oppression and exploitation. That being consumed as a representa-tion of physicality is a process of the body being denied its viscera.

The smooth, blemish-free underside of a round table with lanky metal limbs, spreads across centre-fold, captured in image as if it were being watched from lying position on the cafeteria floor. On the following page, Hannah’s text, “now in the pause between worlds … this frozen time / living in an aftermath”, feels like the eye of a storm; a long waiting that stretches across the limbo time-space of the rest of Columbine Library. In the aftermath of what has been, there grows speculation of what is yet to come. Is there something eschatological about this current moment of feminism?

There are countless contemporary and historical examples of women artists whose works succeed in connecting representations of the body to the lived experience of its fleshliness, and by flesh I mean everything from the pink and green coil of an intestine to the electrical collectivity of intellect. Hannah and Bunny are two good examples of the diverse engagement of artists, ubiquitous in this regard. Their collaboration is brilliant and fleshy. There is something transcendental about it – al-most divine – it embodies “the ecstasy of becoming trash.” **

Beau Dent

Originally published on http://www.aqnb.com/2014/11/14/bunny-rogers-hannah-black-and-the-un-usuble-chaire/, November, 2014

REVIEW

Html Giant‘Cunny Poem Vol. 1’ by Bunny Rogers

Cunny Poem Vol. 1 is an archive, a complete archive, of Bunny Rogers’ poems posted on her tumblr Cunny Poem. As an artist, Rogers’ work focuses on the multiplicity of meaning inherent in objects such as ribbon, blankets, flowers (see her interview with Harry Burke in the latest issue of Mousse Magazine). This sentiment can be felt as well in her newest project. We can look at the book as an object. It is comprehensive. The rose ribbon, speaks to the cover, speaks to the badges, speaks to the dried flowers, speaks to the words inside. Brigid Mason’s illustrations are as haunting as they are beautiful, a horse minus a hoof, a riveting world of eyes and postures. The book becomes multi-dimensional in an extraordinary way, leading us to question what the book can become.

Heidegger states in his essay “Hölderin and the Essence of Poetry” that the crux of the poem lies in the ability of the seemingly trivial to be transformed into the profound. In crude terms, “Poetry looks like a game and yet it is not.” I feel this term can apply to Rogers’ work as an artist and poet. I think what the reference to Heidegger here attempts to say is that the book has a way of inhabiting char-acters, events and spaces quickly but deftly. The book stands in a world where this sort of thing is possible, and it starts with the voice. The speaker switches from I to you, to “Michael Scofield” to “Kate and Sawyer” without thinking twice and without losing the strength of the poet’s voice. In fact this ability to speak from multiple perspectives is what gives the book such poignancy. “Andrea model,” early on in the book, is a good introduction to this voice:

Andrea has porcelain skin

Andrea is not vegan

Andrea makes difficult work

Andrea writes a lot

Andrea does her homework

Andrea looks young

Andrea is sexually inexperienced

And unaware

Andrea has a fetish for constrictive fabrics

I am perceptive

Everyone is in love with Andrea

Three straight men in our grade

One shop tech

And a handful of L train commuters

Andrea needs love too

Andrea doesn’t deserve to die

Want to start fund to save Andrea

One of the longer poems in the book, its two parts are set off wonderfully, and one can’t help but let out a sly chuckle in the, “I am perceptive.” It seems, throughout the book, that the poet is saying “Hey, I’m here, remember me? I’m writing these poems and you are reading them.” This break, these interjections are constant and dynamic, like in “Poem for Bernadette,” “you can laugh safely because this is what i wanted / Its all tailoring u know that”.

Going along with this idea of “tailoring,” although the book involves this vast web of characters and topics, the poems feel resoundingly comfortable and restrained. There is no need to fill, as it were. The structure is already there, and the knowledge of this fact comes through strong. Poems like “I dreamed that God would be forgiving” do this well:

Together five sisters of addiction grow up the walls

entrusting there is no world

in which paranoia could save the two of us

Threat is infinite and jovial

Courage is a wink and a nod

Your spine is a joke

Your vertebrae are stacked snowballs

That will melt as your joints do every hour

In this cruel, hot world

Where every root vegetable shrinks your dick

Where we wake up and go to work to laugh at your dick

Bunny’s work has no need for skeletons. Rather, it liberates objects that have been cast off as skel-etons. The placement of “I dreamed that God” at the end of the collection speaks to this. The idea, I think the word is trust, that a form will arise, is strong, the trust required in putting together a 237-page book of poems. The poems know they will end up being poems. In thinking about possible links within Cunny Poem I am reminded of Stein’s trust of repetition in long poems such as, “Lifting Belly,” “When did I say I thought it. / When you heard it. / Oh yes.” This idea of multiple speakers makes a lot of sense in relation to Cunny. The voice is aware of some other, there are many voices and one doesn’t know who is starting this project, “Oh yes.” The authority of the speaker becomes contentious, who is who? Where do we go from here? Well, anywhere. That sense of freedom is immediately apparent. The speaker is an inherently schizophrenic concept.

The play with voice, the invitation to the reader, “the intercepting of these signs” as Heidegger puts it, is all here. Stein’s interception works through repetition and voice, picking up on a conversation-al almost flippant tone and transforming it into something remarkable. Cunny Poem picks up on everything it seems. The book seems to leave no stone unturned but yet never feels overbearing in the slightest. There is comfort in the play with gratuitousness, with conversation, with manners:

I can wipe that smirk off my face this instance

Authority I thought was pretend authority is real authority

This is not prison

I am Arrogant

This is not prison

Note: Civil Cover Mechanisms will be publishing a book of Bunny’s poems in the fall titled, “My Apologies Accepted” sans ribbon and badges. The book will include watercolors by artist Brad Phillips.

Conor Messinger

Originally published on HtlmGiant’s blog, http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/cunny-poem-vol-1-by-bun-ny-rogers, July, 2014

REVIEW

FanzineA Cunny Poet’s Beautiful Book

Bunny Rogers’s Cunny Poem Vol. 1 functions as an archive — no poem has been omitted from those she wrote between 2012 and 2014, which were originally posted on her tumblr, http://cunny4.tumblr.com. All of these poems, from my very favorites to my least, are compelling and not easily grokked. A statement by Rogers in her 2013 interview with Harry Burke is perhaps a good starting point for approaching the book: “The coexistence of comedy and tragedy in all things is a founda-tional idea for me and thematically appears in the poetry.” Notice that she says “all” things, and a “coexistence,” not resolved, never concluded, settled, simplified.

Likewise, Rogers’s poetry doesn’t become less complicated, uncanny, and striking as you begin to tease out its themes and techniques. Certainly the coexistence of comedy and tragedy is a theme overall, but there are also repeated references to addiction, imprisonment, safety, and death. And there are many symbols, both within the pages and also upon the included ribbon bookmark, emblazoned with roses from Clone High, a short-lived cartoon series whose love-lorn Joan of Arc clone character is part of Rogers’s gallery of heroes or icons (another is Elliott Smith, mentioned in a poem and gifted as one of several custom-made badges that come with the book). Also illustrating and accompanying these poems are drawings by Rogers’s close friend and collaborator Brigid Mason. Chairs, ribbons, and eyes recur in the artwork for the book as well as in Rogers’s visual artwork, for which she is well-known. My intuition is that these symbols, figures, and themes are like the careful decorations of an aesthetically and emotionally sensitive person’s childhood bedroom — she keeps close to her the people and things that feel resonant, expressive, right.

The poems themselves often employ a first-person speaking voice, which ranges from “like”-heavy casual speech to more formal pronouncements. Dark sarcasm and deadpan, ambiguous jokiness pervade the book, which is in keeping with the comedy/tragedy theme. There is something unnerv-ing in these poems’ ambiguity of intent and meaning. Nothing is resolved, nothing is simply a joke or simply not, nothing is “honest” or means one stable thing. Rogers said, in the same 2013 Burke interview, that she doesn’t think she is or can be “honest,” only “accurate.”

What is Rogers accurate about? For one thing, her work is accurate in its portrayal of the confusing, frustrating, sick and degrading dynamic that can exist between heterosexual men and women. Rogers puts it most forcefully in the poem “@ one with the screaming in my head”: “Adorability is fuckability / because children are adorable / and men want to fuck children.” Elsewhere, she com-pares men to cops, those symbols of corrupt, abusive power, but then follows with three repetitions of the line “cuff me Im guilty.” This metaphor for heterosexual dynamics is both playful and not, a joke and not, at once a comedy and a tragedy.

Rogers is also accurate in her portrayal of mourning, of perpetual sadness, of being alone and thinking and feeling, in a prison of one’s own. There is no exit except through the ephemeral com-forts, the sedative drugs, the ego-gratification of attention and sex. There is the sad victory of doing what you want, even though it will hurt some other people and some people won’t like it and some people won’t understand it. Rogers quips, “Guilt is doing what you want.” She says, “In the end you marry your illness.” This perspective on life, where the best course of action is still terrible, where nothing is perfect, only the best you could do, is not comforting, but it feels accurate to me. Rogers writes, in the last poem of the book, “Dewey,” that “You pick a god figure / You work with what u have / You sink and accept the sinking / You drive a car through a fence.” But the perspective shifts — the “you” of the poem, who thought she was being a cocky badass, who drinks in the drivers seat, who feels desired and clever, is in fact not the driver but the passenger, a “Passenger in a drivers seat.”

The perspective shifts again — you watch yourself die on a television in a bar, and you judge your-self, you don’t like yourself, you’re dead. The book begins with defiance and ends with death. At first a disavowal, a pushing-away of the audience: “My Art sucks”; “I dont owe anybody anything!”

— and, finally, violent closure: “You suck / You die.”

Given that Rogers is friends with Marie Calloway, that a paperback collection of poems is forthcom-ing from Civil Coping Mechanisms, that she has been published by Illuminati Girl Gang and has many friends in common with “Alt Lit”-associated people, she will perhaps inevitably be compared to other contemporary poets on the internet, especially those writing in first-person about their lives, a mode which is frequently (and reductively) called “confessional poetry.” Rogers’s poetry is not a face-value, sentimental, diaristic poetry, but neither is it primarily tongue-in-cheek, affect-heavy, wink-wink poetry — in that sense, she doesn’t wholly fit with much of Alt Lit or with the smart, chic, satirical poets with whom she’s read live in New York. Instead her poems feel simultaneously like spontaneous emissions from a linguistically fluid, clever, sensitive mind and like uncannily irreduc-ible, finely crafted miniatures. Rogers has feelings, she has thoughts — and, to quote her again, “Like I always say Im too smart for this.”

Stephen Tully Dierks

Originally published on TheFanzine’s blog, http://thefanzine.com/a-cunny-poets-beautiful-book, July, 2014

REVIEW

The Art Book ReviewCunny Poem Vol. 1

Immediately abandon a desire for neutrality in this review of Bunny Rogers’ first book of poetry, which is actually a sculpture, or an unnameable 1.4 pound object, containing drawings and illus-trations in a hardbound 232 page book, accompanied by a ribbon and two bizarre embroidered patches.

Mine has an inscription that you won’t get.

Three things – this is the first book I’ve ever seen with an epigraph that is a quote from Neopets.

“…You wish to be aloneNot studiedNor put on displayNeopets are afraid of you…”

Shadow Usul by Link1429Neopets, Inc. 1999-2014

two poems on page 66

I can’t wait to share you

All men are copscuff me Im guiltycuff me Im guiltycuff me Im guilty

on page 11

Hiccup

Maybe churchWho am I kidding

*

These two poems are emblematic of what I know Bunny to be: terse, sad/funny, aloof about typos or typo-stylist extraordinaire.

How do you start to review something with bias and affection?

Like this -

In April 2012 I was in an institution in the Pacific Northwest. I was allowed to go to the library to check my email. There was an email from a Bunny Rogers asking if she could interview me. I don’t like being interviewed but she said it was for school, and I feel a sad terror for students. I answered what were rather pointless point form questions, had I ever dyed my hair? How tall was I?

THE INTERNETBunny added me on Facebook. I looked at Bunny. She looked like someone I would know. She looked like I knew her. I knew her. I was in an all male environment for three months. Bunny was access to a new weird female brain. Maybe that sounds awful but she knows it and it’s fine with her.

Her website is confusing and it’s meant to be I imagine. I couldn’t tell how old Bunny was, because her website was a vast archive of her entire experience growing up online. Every user name she’d ever had on any website, and photographs going back to high-school, maybe earlier. I only saw that her hair got longer, her face stayed the same. Which was a combination of invitation and ac-cusation. Bunny knows I’m not the best person in the world, it’s why we’re friends. The stickiness of her website and constant play of roles, presentation, self presentation—morphability, attracts certain types, a lot of young women, (seemingly innumerable young women adore Bunny), art types, my type, possibly much uglier, baser types. She welcomes everyone in and leaves nothing unexposed. Also nothing is exposed. Everything is high theatrics and crushing autobiography at once. You can’t find her but she’s everywhere—I know where she is right now, tonight, some others do I imagine. Bunny allows herself to be what you want her to be for you. The poetry in this book, unless Bunny has manipulated me too, which, she’s smart and I wouldn’t be surprised, seems to be the real hangover of constantly playing at being alive.

My encounter with her writing was post-institution (I was living in a choreographed housing environ-ment for nine months). This was when I had access to telephones. Bunny asked if I wanted to talk. I wanted to talk. I was living with longshoremen, line cooks, jailbirds—not that I didn’t like or have anything in common with those guys, I just couldn’t get certain things. I couldn’t get a woman’s voice from them. I had no money to call her in New York so she called me. Ten men in the house, the phone was usually busy, usually fifty-year-old men on the phone with their mothers asking for money, on the phone with their ex-wives asking for money, on the phone with their daughters asking for money.

I had money. I only wanted a quiet voice. My wife was hanging-up the phone when I called. Her squawky hello was all I got. Bunny got through at one point. Her voice was something unexpect-ed. Like she was calling from a phone next to a sea anemone, 30 feet underwater. If you watch her reading her work, she has a lilting, musical lack of affect. It’s alluring and it’s upsetting. She said something like “Bradley” – which no one calls me, which she always calls me—only my dead father and people (other types) who beat me up called me that. It was fine with her. She asked if I ever wrote poems and I said yes although I know they’re bad, I can only write bad poetry—in part because almost all poetry now is abysmal. She asked me to read her one and I did because why not. I can’t remember it, I don’t want to. She asked if I wanted to hear one of hers and I never had before. So she started – maybe ten words later she said, “Bradley?” and I realized I’d missed the poem. It was that short. It was conversational. It was essentially the same as her conversation—simple, dry, unornamented and brief. Like missing the lightning strike and your friend says, “Wow, did you see that?”

There are three ways, more of course, to look at this book/sculpture/trip wire. If you’re young, a young woman especially (if I can say that), it presents as a sincere, heartfelt book of poetry, with signs of hurt womanhood, the travails of a sexual body—it comes with ribbons, it’s sad/tragic/funny/confessional. Were I a 22-year-old woman living in a small town with dreams of one day becoming an artist and moving to the big city, it would be a treasure of sincerity, speeding unapologetic writ-ing, speaking for a generation and a type. Such sincerity. Take the ribbon bookmark and make it a bracelet, to align you with Bunny Rogers and signify inclusion in a secret club.

The space between the first and third way of looking at this book is perhaps the way I see it most clearly.

Smash television show – Dateline: To Catch a Predator. They catch predators! A young woman with the help of a coterie of creepy ponytailed men who are internet vigilantes and work with NBC set traps for pedophiles online. The woman poses as a young girl. She knows the argot of internet chat rooms, because she’s in them all the time ‘researching’ and ‘working’ and she gets it. She’s authen-

tic. A scenario would be like this. Notice the similarities between To Catch a Predator narratives and the heyday of pornography with inchoate preamble styles. The pizza man is coming, the pizza man is sexy. The girl does not have enough money to pay the pizza man. The pool boy is coming. He is sexy. No money. On To Catch a Predator, a witless pederast is duped into believing a young girl/boy is home alone, and wants to spend some time with an exciting adult. Typically when these men are busted coming into the home, they all seem to be carrying similar items. Condoms, wine coolers, McDonald’s, cigarettes, beer. In their minds, they have imagined (been entrapped) into believing a pre- or pubescent girl/boy is home alone and wants to just fool around. With anal sex. Inevitably the audience is shocked by the democratic array of offenders. A circuit court judge, a teenager, a lawyer, a rabbi, a hockey coach, a unemployed piece of shit living with his mother. The point that is driven home is that everywhere lurks a predator, they don’t wear trench coats, they ar-en’t ‘evil’ looking. It’s the horrifying normalcy that is the real threat. All men are potential pedophiles. Of course, this is true. They all back out of the story in the same way when confronted, ‘this was my first time’, I just didn’t like ‘her being home alone’ – wanted her to be safe (from people like me!). The reactions are few. Shame, fear, embarrassment. No bombast. Everyone wants to go home! Of course they do. But they won’t! The camera shows us that. Later on the host, the overly righteous 28-year-old hormonally challenged vigilante who actually does look 14, her comrades in cargo shorts, they all pat each other on the back, “job well done, job well done.” Well—if you create a job for yourself, it’s quite easy to finish it… if you have tenacity. In reality there are probably not as many 12-year-old girls inviting grown men into their home while their careless parents are at salsa lessons to experiment with blowjobs and BDSM as television would have us believe. Fear of pedophiles is rampant, it’s exciting television. Fear of pedophiles is reasonable, they ruin lives. Their own includ-ed. The point which I might be making poorly is that To Catch a Predator is classical entrapment. Bait-and-switch—offer a 12-year-old and nascent breasts, deliver 14 cops and an asshole with a microphone.

The third way is to look at Bunny’s poems, and Brigid Masons’ illustrations, as a very good artwork. Each of Mason’s drawings is of a chair or incorporates a chair. A very similar chair lost in time. Chairs are multiform, chairs can be used for masturbation, for punishment, for idleness, for suicide, for being turned into a corner, for being tied to. The illustrations are very innocent. In this way they are also very menacing. Pencil drawings by an adult women, of whimsical chairs to accompany poems about drugs and death and boredom become nefarious by association. There are many many poems in this book, two years worth, unexpurgated and unrelenting. There could be some-thing to say about the linearity and comprehensiveness of the writing, but it doesn’t interest me. If you have a chance to make your first book, you also just want to get as much as you can in there. The poems live outside of line breaks, cadence, meter—they are full of internet syntax: h8 instead of hate, cuz instead of cause. There are spelling mistakes and stutters. That they were printed as such is obviously intentional. They satisfy both a connection to the internet, and the communicative modes of young people, as well as demonstrating the urgency to record quickly. They also, in this way, say fuck you. What I enjoy is the fuck you.

In the putative innocence of the object, the coyly evil and inviting illustrations, the book is bait. The book appears to promise access to shattered youth. In fact it aims to shatter you. Each poem and the entire enterprise is intensely antagonistic. These are poems of poems. Illustrations of il-lustrations—a sculpture of a book. The multiple ways to engage with this work are what make it so compelling, there is no incorrect way to interpret it. It actually is a book of poetry, and it actually is a piece of conceptual art that’s venomously hostile and loaded. As in To Catch a Predator—the invitation appears sincere, you feel you’re communing with quaking youth, and it can be that, but if you are of a certain type, you become aware of the falsity of the environment—why does the child never come out of the room, constantly telling you she’s getting dressed and to relax? The home looks like a showcase. And then the microphone, your pants are down, you’re carrying Vodka and a Big Mac – police outside the window, what will your wife think. Everything flashing. You just were worried she was home alone. And you were worried. And you were also the worrisome thing.

Beyond all of this, Bunny Rogers writes beautiful poems. Without considering her intentions, they can be heartbreaking, funny, poisonous, with twelve words, less. They may be romantic, but it’s

a romantics of the utterly boring and ordinary. When we first became friends, we learned we both had been obsessed (her more and still) with the show Prison Break. In her writing these characters are real; people in her life. I imagine they are actually people in her life. In all her work there’s a purposeful conflation of real life and entertainment and social media. Characters from Neopets, herself in Second Life, Prison Break, her best friends— they’re all given equal treatment. One poem can give you more feeling for Doctor Tancredi from Prison Break than you might for Bunny’s own father in a different poem. Her ability to treat every character, real or fabricated, as an important character in her life is emblematic of a mushroom cloud of heartbreak. Like Philip Larkin she writes concisely about the nothing of how we fill our days. It’s a feat of creativity to compose poems that work as poems, in a book that works as sculpture, in a package that presents as a pipe-bomb wrapped in pink cotton candy.

There is a cult feeling to this project. Bunny attracts a devoted following, whether their under-standing of her work is mistaken, accurate, or sincere in being so mistaken. In time, this book will be sought with cultish desirability as a fetish to many different needs and aspirations. I can only imagine.

Brad Phillips

Originally published on http://theartbookreview.org/2014/07/22/cunny-poem-vol-1/, July, 2014

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Bunny Rogers, Cunny Poem Vol. 1, Illustrations by Brigid Mason (Small Batch Books, 2014)Images: Cover and interior of Cunny Poem Vol. 1, courtesy of the artists’ website.

REVIEW

AnimalHere Is The ‘Cunny Poem’ Book By Bunny Rogers

Artist Bunny Rogers has just released her much-anticipated book of poetry with original illustrations.

In addition to her sculptural work, online artworks, installations, game-based projects and perfor-mances, the Queens Museum resident artist has been doing poetry readings across North Ameri-ca. Cunny Poem Vol. 1 represents a complete archive of poetry written from 2012-2014.

One of my favorite Rogers readings, at Unnamable Books, included this poem:

I DREAMED THAT GOD WOULD BE FORGIVING

Three charming rooms talk back and forth enlisted for their strength and stamina Together five sisters of addiction grow up the walls entrusting there is no world in which paranoia could save the two of us Threat is infinite and jovial Courage is a wink and a nod Your spine is a joke Your vertebrae are stacked snowballs That will melt as your joints do every hour without fail In this cruel, hot world Where every root vegetable shrinks your dick Where we wake up and go to work to laugh at your dick

Read ANIMAL’s interview with Bunny about her “Shades of Berny” exhibit and a profile of her col-laborative show with Filip Olszewski, ”If I Die Young.” Purchase the book here and get a ”MERYN” purple heart patch, WHAAAAZZUP?” Tilikum tribute patch, and a satin ribbon bookmark (artist’s choice of color).

Marina Galperina

Originally published on http://animalnewyork.com/2014/cunny-poem-book-bunny-rogers/, June, 2014

REVIEW

Beach SlothNo Petals Left on a Dying Rose: A Reading for Oskana

Poor Rose never had a chance. Young flower grew up and bloomed tremendously. Every flower becomes broken at some point. Bill Murray explored this concept of flowers with their confidence gone in “Broken Flowers” a movie exclusively about flowers. Unfortunately Unnameable Books knows nothing about a dying rose. They trade in dead trees with words on them, better known as books. Fortunately to give the written word a little life Unnameable Books is hosting a number of writers in the first installment of the Gemstone Reading Series. Below are some of the illuminated family friendly names to expect as unnamable:

Jess Dutschmann is a perennial Beach Sloth favorite. Everybody ought to check out her works which are literally everywhere. Her work is dramatically different and serves as an effective portal into her generous mind. Beach Sloth cannot recommend reading Jess Dutschmann enough. Who-ever fails to read Jess Dutschmann’s work fails at life!

Laura Marie Marciano rules. She put together this delightful group of readers. There is going to be a lot of good stuff coming from Laura Marie Marciano in 2014. Heads are not ready for it but heads are not ready for much.

Gabby Bess is the artist formerly known as Gabby Gabby. For a long time Gabby Bess and Beach Sloth have been the best of friends. Most recently Gabby Bess was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms. New York City is proud to have Gabby Bess as a resident and Beach Sloth is proud to call her friend.

Bunny Rogers works in mysterious ways. Her work is incredibly good. Though Beach Sloth has met her multiple times Beach Sloth is not sure if she exists or if she is the figment of everyone’s imagi-nation. Bunny Rogers makes the stuff that dreams are made of.

Stephen Tully Dierks is the most famous thing to come out of Madison, Wisconsin since cheese. Nobody can compete with Stephen Tully Dierks and his Pop Serial game. Lots of people have got-ten their start on Pop Serial. A yearly tradition it has become highly revered and celebrated among people all over the world.

Ben Fama might be a true legend, a God among the mere mortals that amuse him on a daily basis. Up on high, riding his chariot, bringing the sun across the sky, Ben Fama brings light to the crea-tures that need it most: plants that use the light for photosynthesis.

Mike Young has written many books celebrating the world around him. The humor he uses for his writing is genuine and sincerely felt. Reading his work can help one discover the beauty that exists all around. Common occurrences can be lovely if given enough attention.

Cassandra Gillig rocks! There is no other way to put it. Whether she does a mash-up or puts out her own material she is great. Her take on PowerPoint has no peers. Everything she does is laugh out loud funny.

Such a collection of readers can only happen once in a blue moon. Hopefully Laura will find the dye to blue the moon.

Sloth Beach

Originally published on Sloth Beach‘s blog http://beachsloth.blogspot.de/2014/01/no-petals-left-on-dying-rose-reading.html, January, 2014

INTERVIEW

West Space JournalApologies, Harry Burke talks to Bunny Rogers.

Why poetry?

My active years as a Neopets.com user (2000-2003) inspired a lot of creative writing and greatly influenced plotlines and characters. Elsa’s Journey was my first published piece, appearing in Issue 25 of The Neopian Times. I was ten years old. Getting published made me feel closer to finding happiness. Subsequent submissions were regularly accepted. I felt satisfied by the content I was working with—veiled autobiography—and comfortable with my audience, which was largely anonymous, and kind. It seemed I was making progress in my dream to become a children’s book author and illustrator.

I expanded into self-publishing in 2002 via LiveJournal, which many of the members in my arts-fo-cused guild also participated in. We opened accounts for ourselves and for our Neopets, with the intention of building an inclusive platform for roleplaying and storytelling. Owner-designated journals frequently contained both in-character and [semi-protected] out-of-character entries. Ob-servation of friends’ comfort with OOC posts encouraged me to write my own. This was appealing. My family had just made another major move, I was having the usual trouble adjusting, and I was lonely. I was excited by the prospect of a legitimate emotional outlet. Initial personal posts, which were relatively truthful recordings of my daily life (I continued to lie about my age, embellish, etc.) were well-received. However, this is when everything fell apart. The more I revealed of Bunny Rog-ers, the less stable my identity as Catnip4 became. Relationships with fellow Neopians grew quickly unmanageable; I was overwhelmed with embarrassment and shame. I deleted my LiveJournals, abandoned Neopets, and started life anew in Furcadia as Serineana the musteline. I stopped writ-ing on my own almost completely.

In January 2012 Gene McHugh asked me if I wanted to participate in a casual artists’ reading. I agreed not having written much of anything in ten years. What I presented here was a batch of eighteen short collages of previously-posted Facebook status updates, notes to myself, and col-lected or stolen text. The spring and summer following when I struggled to produce artwork, mak-ing more of these “poems” was the only creative thing I could get myself to do. Launching Cunny poem in June was humiliating in a way similar to my LiveJournal, but it had to be done. I had nothing else. The response has been pacifying and I have not had a shortage in material. I am grateful. For me, Cunny poem is a small step forward in finding the confidence to write again.

Who’s the audience in your poems? How present are they when you’re writing them, and how directly are they addressed?

I imagine my audience as perfect, comprised of one. Far away from me or dead.

Is honesty a virtue for you?

No, but accuracy is. I don’t think I am or can be honest.

What’s the presence of love in your work? Chris Kraus has said “every letter is a love letter”. Is the same true about poems?

I have liked to think of my poems as apologies.

Harry Burke

Originally published in West Space Journal, Issue 1, Winter, 2013

REVIEW

DAZEDLove Letter to Bunny Rogers

Harry Burke explores the poetry of the net sensation weaving romance into browser tabs.My friend Rachael Allen recently shared with me a screenshot of some tabs she had open. There was nothing that spectacular about it - it was part of an email thread we’d been having in the back-ground to both of us working late - yet exactly in its banality something caught my eye - a poem, in its bottom right hand corner (“Word and Things” by Noelle Kocot; I googled it). It might have been a side effect to having been staring at a laptop screen for the past twelve hours, but this struck me as an amazingly intimate and intricate detail to be shared into, if not at the same time somehow an inherently nostalgic one. For trends come and go with increasing punctuality online, but what level of removal do you exist in when you look at such an image and think “, this reminds me of 2010”?

Attempting to validate this, which felt something like trying to find a receipt for an old desire, I came back across Frank Hinton’s video “Your search - DOIUFHEFIUAEGHFIUEAfiuahef - did not match any documents”, uploaded to Vimeo two years ago. Taking the announcement of a new blog called Internet Poetry as its starting point, this video then stagnates through the internet for six minutes, combining (aligning?) the ennui of StumbleUpons and failed google searches with flashes of poetry and other subjective interventions. Internet Poetry is a tumblr initiated by Steve Roggenbuck, which publishes “screenshots of poetry being distributed with guerilla tactics on the internet”. Predomi-nantly populated by snippets of social media and image macros, the site nonetheless suggests a rupture in how the poem relates to the context that surrounds it. For in a lot of ways the screenshot provides a visual analogue for the place of the poem in relation to the internet. Essentially a bit of reality cut out and saved for later(imagine how the screenshot might develop if Google Glass becomes commonplace), the screenshot, like StumbleUpon, prizes the accidental connections and associations that arise in web-like or rhizomatic information structures. In this way it is not too dissimilar from the process of poetry itself, for if you put common building blocks (language) together in playful and experimental ways, new forms will come out of this, and new standards will eventually be invented.

Hinton’s video takes this as read, crawling through the sorts of contexts and associations that provide the architecture of life and creativity online. Yet if this is so much the structure of how we consume information (how many other articles, videos, status updates are you engaging with as you read this?), why does so much writing published online replicate the white background and confined borders of the printed page? Even the Internet Poetry blog carries this form; it becomes perhaps most revealing and visually stimulating as you visit its archive. If the emergence of the screenshot poem can be seen as simultaneous with a predominance of associations as a tactic for making sense of contemporary culture, then its demise occurs most likely for the same reason. In a culture where connections are already ubiquitous, why further visualise this?

Bunny Rogers I don’t think ever made a screenshot poem. But her poetry exists defiantly within this condition of connectedness, sticking biros, needles, roses in it. What were the associations that came to you when you first saw a pair of legs, disembodied but heeled, an image rigidly vertical as if holding up the poem it sits beneath? Or the image of her next to filipa, who seems as ambiguous and careful as her writing, maybe her lover, maybe her teacher, maybe both?

The truth claim of photography is the term used by Tom Gunning to describe the prevalent belief that traditional photographs accurately depict reality. Drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, he uses the concept of ‘indexicality’ to refer to the physical relationship between the object photographed and the resulting image. Rogers’ images, just like her poems, operate on the exact same claims of truth, yet playfully and purposefully skewer this indexicality. Indexical behaviour or points to (or indicates) some state of affairs - there could be no more accurate description of Rogers’ work. Yet how do they do this pointing? What’s this state of affairs?

Further, what if we were to take the poem as a screenshot in the midst of patriarchy? Or capitalist

hegemony? Or more prosaically, love? Rogers’ poetry exists in a relationship to an art practice, to a social media presence, to presumably much of her character and personality in real life, as well as to a tradition and discourse of poetry itself. It is exactly their sparsity, their aloofness and their ephemerality that highlights the extent to which their meaning relies on all that which surrounds them, and it is this makes them so compelling. For it isn’t just that their meaning is constructed through this indexicality, but that it subverts it. “u can’t squueezw blood from a shoe” reads as as furious and compelling a statement as “I used to smile to say hello”; in both cases they take idioms and conventions and reveal their brutality. What sort of resolution comes out of this is left unsaid, and if anything this becomes a question forced upon the reader.

There’s an old creative writing maxim that forms the backbone to probably every creative writing class or introductory manual: “show don’t tell”. If the internet does both, then Bunny Rogers does neither. For as video trailers, personal brands and other extra-poetic measures become increas-ingly part of the landscape of contemporary poetry, they of course put pressure on how the poem works and means. If the screenshot poem marks the point where context becomes part of the language of the poem, then Rogers’ work destabilises not simply one nor the other, but both, and the relationship between the two in general. And if they’re indexical, then it is exactly the truth claim of this that they point to.

Harry Burke

Originally published in Dazed, May, 2013

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