As a child, Fawn Rogers would create sculptures out of the mud from a riverbank near her Portland, Oregon, home. She would work the earth with her hands to fashion small figures, which she then returned to the water. Years later, Rogers is still exploring “the unending conflict between human nature and the unbuilt world,” she says, through painting, sculpture, and video art. “The current geological era is, as I see it, a colossal crime scene, and we’re all personally involved.”
Car Meat, 2023, accident-impacted car hoods, casters, meat hooks, trolleys, automotive paint, 94 x 60 x 30 inches.
Rogers allows her own spontaneous attraction to materials to guide her creative process. Her recent works, such as R.I.P. and Car Meat (which was exhibited in November at Galerie Marguo in Paris), address animal extinction and the environmental harm that results when cars strike animals. Lately, Rogers has also been examining her Cherokee grandmother’s life, which she relates to the death of the natural world. “There are many intersecting themes,” she says, “among them the exacerbated challenges faced by Indigenous communities in the wake of greed, climate change, and globalization.” The through line in all her work is the hope that viewers will continue “to reevaluate their relationship with the natural world and to each other.”
