Sexual Pleasure to Death: An Interview of Fawn Rogers on Her Series "The World is Your Oyster"

Fawn Rogers
Jestope, 2022

interview by Millen Brown-Ewens
hair by Justin Inman
makeup by Niohuru X
all images copyright Fawn Rogers

MILLEN BROWN-EWENS: Could you start by telling me a little bit about the paintings in your upcoming solo exhibition Burn, Gleam, Shine in Beijing with Galerie Marguo in July. 

FAWN ROGERS: The work is from a series called The World is Your Oyster. The paintings are larger-than-life representations of sea personalities, which invite the viewer to dwell on the unbuilt world, death, and sex. Photorealistic from afar, at a closer view they are composed of painterly shapes and forms. They are seductive, erotic paintings that celebrate female sexuality. But I hope people will consider their wider resonances too. Human intervention in their cultivation has changed the primary process of their creation and relationships. Eroticism in this time is fraught with scary implications. We are so atomized as a species and removed from our origins that placing sexuality alongside environmental destruction almost feels forbidden, but I like things that feel forbidden.

BROWN-EWENS: What is the significance of the erotic and ostentatious image of the oyster in your paintings and how do you think this offers a critique of anthropocentrism? 

ROGERS: I can’t help but to dismantle anthropocentrism in my work. At times it feels like a burden I was born with, it’s my reality, but essentially, I’m trying to find harmony through my work. The World is Your Oyster pays homage to these idiosyncratic and complex forms, inviting viewers to consider life, sex, and death simultaneously. While oysters are commonly considered luxurious rarities forged by nature, like many things, we have subverted the organic process of their creation. The oysters are harvested and pearls cultivated. An excision made to the oyster's flesh assaults the viewers' senses; ultimately this work is both violent and sensual, and at the center of these contradictions, the oyster is a symbol of lust, pleasure, opulence, and indulgence, all-consuming and offered up for consumption, a literal embodiment of the anthropocentric. 

Oysters are both very fragile and highly sensual. It’s so easy to forget about the suffering of other lifeforms, they all want to live just as much as we do. The spider in the shower, let it live or kill it? I’m trying to place the human in patchworks of vibrant ecologies. I want to feel the delicacy and complexity of the tangled tension and vulnerable webs of life that surround us. This is connected to pleasure too. Our society represses sexuality, especially female sexuality, at the same time as it regards other life forms as unimportant. It is the same violent and disregarding gesture. It’s ostentatious to even be alive. Human existence is really a volatile party at the expense of all other life. Our role is both hilariously small and frighteningly disastrous. I try to call attention to expanding empathy for all life and not give up—dark humor helps. 

BROWN-EWENS: Can you describe the conflicts between human nature and the natural world that arise in your practice?

ROGERS: It’s not just my practice, it’s my internal conflict because it’s how I view our world. I am trying to be present in a world that is being destroyed and full of suffering, and I am part of that destruction. When I paint a massive clam floating on a brightly colored, monochromatic background with its plump tongue sticking out, it’s darkly funny to me. It’s both sexy and gross to look at, and I have to kill it, consciously or unconsciously, to survive. We are supposed to have a conscience, and you’d think we would use it for creating a better world, but we don’t. Instead, let's go to Mars. It’s grimly ironic.

A good example from my practice is a work entitled R.I.P., a re-envisioning of the game of chess with chessmen depicted as sculptures of recently extinct animals. Black and white patina bronze on an oversized faux fur board, the animals are presented with regal dignity and personality. Each sculpture has material weight and nobility. Chess is a game of triumph, but triumph is a corollary of conquest. It is an enduring artifact of strategy, competition, domination, and has long been admired as a bastion of logic and order, but it is, at its core, a game of war, predicated on machinations of violence and obliteration. The game’s colonial history is traceable from ancient India, to the Muslim world, to imperial civilizations in Europe and northern Asia. Coupled with an emphasis on dominance, chess finds fresh implications in the contemporary subjugation of the natural world. Even the historical styles of chess—Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodern, and New Dynamism—allude to shifting cultural values and power structures, concluding, perhaps, with the game’s association with technology and artificial intelligence.

Chess has also long held a place of fascination for artists. Matisse, Man Ray, Duchamp, Paul Klee, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread have all engaged with the game of chess. Jake and Dinos Chapman in their 2003, Chess Set, give resonant form to pre-adolescent male obsessions with fantasy forms of conflict, violence, and mutation. I wanted to repurpose a familiar form. In its prescient entanglements of order and chaos, civility and savagery, R.I.P. presses past a playful exploration of anthro-ecological history and evades purely dogmatic, observational, or elegiac orientations. The viewer becomes a player, autonomous yet complicit: a participant in the Anthropocene, at once a witness and contributor to a legacy of humanity, immortalization, and extinction.

Fawn Rogers
Free of God, 2021
oil on canvas
65 x 85 inches

BROWN-EWENS: What is ecofeminism and why is it important to distinguish?

ROGERS: I believe that the forces of patriarchy and everyone that support it oppress female-identifying and non-binary people, and they also exploit the natural world. At the same time, though, I feel that all people hold responsibility for our huge, sad state. For me, my work is liberatory. It makes me aware of the powers that emerge between people, and the world’s ecosystems. I am interested in a future evolution of humanity with empathy, less repression and destruction. In this geological era, our planet is a giant crime scene and we are all implicated. I am interested in finding ways to unleash emancipatory and sensual possibilities that may embed us more deeply in actuality.

BROWN-EWENS: Evocative titles add an additional layer to these pieces, calling on historical and pop cultural imagery such as Our Lady of Guadalupe for symbolic imagery. Could you talk a little bit about this piece in particular and its narrative within the series? 

ROGERS: I find the concept of the Virgin Mary to be repressive. The idea of virginity as sacred and virtuous is a denial of the power of sexuality. I was interested in embracing Mary as utterly human. I wanted to free her from oppressive ideas that are antithetical to human equality. In this painting, you are looking at Mary’s giant sex. But it is not a desecration. I see it as a celebration of reality, a way of honoring life. I wanted to subvert the myths that have been written by men and supported by women, myths that have oppressed women across history. Poor Eve. Poor you, poor me! Ultimately, these ideas oppress everyone. 

BROWN-EWENS: Your style incorporates hyperrealism with conceptualism to create these pillowy, silky scenes. Could you tell me a little bit about the interaction of these styles and practically how you set about depicting them?

ROGERS: I like the interplay between the representational qualities of painting and scale. My paintings of oysters teeter between realism and abstraction, depending on your point of view. They are my mandalas with a prayer, but I’m not religious. Before these paintings, however, I created a body of works called Eat You Eat Me, a two-channel video, The World is Your Oyster, then another series called Poisonous Harmony—all flirting with ideas that would come together in these current paintings. It was at this point when I found myself wanting to create these giant, sexy, wet, gooey oysters and through that deep dive arrived at wanting to have a visceral experience up close and personal with their forms. After painting them in a realistic way, I found the process a bit boring and decided to go back over each of them to take a closer look, and that’s how I ended up with this representational interplay that highlights the oyster’s many complicated and confounding qualities. They can harbor deadly bacteria while being a delicacy and perhaps an aphrodisiac. Plus, there are so many fertile concepts that attach to oysters. The expression “the world is your oyster” is said to young people embarking on life, but it comes from a Shakespeare play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and there is an undertone of violence in how it is used. Dutch historical paintings of feasts often depict oysters and their symbolism for morality or sensuality. During the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919, oyster beds were raided because they were thought to help prevent the disease. Oysters span everything from sexual pleasure to death, environmental violence and luxury consumption to femininity. They are even being used to build storm barriers in New York. 

Fawn Rogers
Comet Tail #3, 2022
oil on canvas
14 x 11 inches

BROWN-EWENS: I’m intrigued by your photo series which you have described as exploring your Cherokee heritage. Do you think your ancestry has influenced your dedication and attentiveness to the natural world?

ROGERS: These photographic images were the start of my exploration into my Cherokee heritage. It is an oppressive history and is connected with a violent removal from the unbuilt world. My Cherokee ancestors walked the Trail of Tears to a reservation in Oklahoma. They became cotton pickers and also collected venomous water moccasin to survive. My great-grandmother was removed from her mother and placed in a home with European settlers. Her daughter, my grandmother, eventually made her way to the Oregon coast, where oysters were and still are harvested. To be free of the shame they lived with, because they hid their history, I chose to be naked in these images, and the photos contain symbolic details: horses, eagle feathers, pearls, handprints. If there is a single symbol for humanity it is the image of the human handprint. It can be seen on every continent and across all ages. The pearls are also fascinating. Everything from the history of the pearl with First Nations people to the way they are formed from irritants to gems. 

BROWN-EWENS: What do you hope people take from this work?

ROGERS: I don’t expect any particular response. Maybe I hope people might react to this series in a way that is visceral. I want the paintings to draw you in and spit you back out. I do hope the collection will trigger thoughts about the fragility of life and the equality of all people. The splendor of sex. The beauty of the pussy! 

BROWN-EWENS: I understand you’re set to have a busy year. What else have you got coming up?

ROGERS: June 24th, I’m excited to be included in the group show, Beach, at Nino Mier in New York. I just finished five group shows across Asia, the US, and Europe, including a Sotheby’s benefit auction curated by Nadya Tolokonnikova, who cofounded Pussy Riot. I also have an exhibition with Penske Projects curated by Sophia Penske at Phillips, which just closed in LA along with Boil, Toil & Trouble in Chicago curated by Zoe Lukov. In Beijing with Galerie Marguo, coming up July 13th is a solo exhibition titled Burn, Gleam, Shine. I have another solo in September titled GODOG in Los Angeles with sculpture, paintings and neon curated by Michael Slenske at Lauren Powell Projects. I’m also working on a new body of work, going from surf to turf and will be showing video, paintings, and sculpture with Galerie Marguo for a solo exhibition in Paris in October titled Come Ruin or Rapture. So we’ll see what happens after that!

Fawn Rogers
The Bee, 2023

Pointless Prophet: An Interview With Joe McKee On The Occasion Of His New Video Premiere

text by Summer Bowie

Joe McKee might have been everyone’s best friend in a past life. He’s full of charming witticisms, unexpected humor, moments of sober pontification, and there’s always a little light in his eyes that let’s you know he’s really listening. To hear him play music is a little bit like a secular religious experience. There’s no call to worship, but something about his sound is invariably transcendent. All of that thoughtful articulation in his discourse gets shrouded in a layered veil of sonic silk. It’s much like listening to a song in a language you don’t speak. You might be able to make out a word here and there, but you can never tell if your interpretation of the song is correct, or if you’ve just projected your own story onto it. McKee’s second solo album, An Australian Alien tells the true story of the artist’s journey through the loss of a best friend, the birth of a daughter, and the experience of processing a major life transition while being processed as an immigrant. Now five years an Angeleno, McKee is feeling much more at home geographically, but he’ll always be an alien of sorts: daringly vulnerable, abnormally modest (and not just for an Angeleno), and uniquely eloquent. I had the chance to ask Joe a few questions about the album and the pleasure of premiering his latest video—and maybe, just maybe, I’ll find myself in someone’s living room some day, enjoying a private performance by the alien himself.  

SUMMER BOWIE: I want to start by talking about the title of your new album, An Australian Alien. You’ve been in LA for about 5 years now. Do you still feel like an alien here in the States? Having been born in England, did you feel like an English alien in Australia? 

JOE MCKEE: I've always felt a little bit alien and I probably always will. I suppose that comes from being transplanted, as a ripe young chap, from the grey kingdom of Londonium to the outback of Australia. Everything was familiar but strangely different, like a bizarro world where Burger King is called Hungry Jacks and so on. I spoke the same language, but I was still the "other." I was probably quite self conscious of this growing up, but I learned to celebrate those subtle differences as I got older, I suppose. 

So, that 'alien' word was bandied about all over the application forms for my permanent residency to remain in the United States. An Australian Alien had a nice ring to it. It's musical, and it's playful. Prior to living in the US, I was vagabonding around Europe, sleeping on peoples couches, outstaying my welcome wherever I was performing. Always a tourist, even at home. I feel like I've finally found a place to reside and plant some roots in Los Angeles. This is mainly due to becoming a surprise father here.  

BOWIE: So you’ve always felt a bit extraterrestrial? Do you still feel extra-Angeleno? 

MCKEE: Living here in LA? Somewhat, but I feel more at home here than I have for a long time. The album was written primarily during that transition period, when I was still in this state of flux. Living in between. I'd alienated myself from my previous life by moving here, which was difficult and freeing at the same time. I could reinvent myself in a new place and shed all that old scabby skin that was weighing me down. So, I think I just feel more at home in my fresh flesh-suit.

BOWIE: This album was recorded in a number of different locations, including a cargo ship sailing the Pacific, friends’ homes, and a marijuana plantation in Northern California. Have you always been very nomadic while recording, or was this choice made specifically for this album? 

MCKEE: I definitely come from nomadic stock. My family has moved countries every generation for as far back as we can trace. We're all running from something! Or seeking something perhaps. One of the lovely things about making music is that it's weightless. You can do it all inside your noggin' while you're galavanting around the globe. You can hum a melody into your phone, or you can write a lyric on a napkin. I don't have to lug a roll of canvas and my paintbrushes around to create something. 

Having said that, recording this album was a particularly scattered process. I really didn't have a community in LA when I first arrived, nor did I have a cent to my name, so I had to snatch moments to write this record amongst all of the madness of becoming a father, moving to a new country, going through my Saturn's Return, yada yada yada. I relied on the generosity and kindness of strangers really.

BOWIE: If I’ve ever to known anyone to experience Saturn’s Return it would be you.  Do you subscribe to this theory, or have you gained any deeper perspective on the chaos of your late twenties? 

MCKEE: I think the Saturn's Return concept is a poetic way to understand any turmoil or life-shift. I think there’s probably some truth to it. I know what I went through was a mind-bending and ego-crushing experience. I was ruled by my ego in my twenties and I was increasingly dissatisfied with what was happening in my life, to be honest. Things had fragmented and life seemed like a labyrinth. So the universe came along and obliterated my concept of reality. It dealt me a cataclysmic hand. My best friend passed away and I was becoming a father with a virtual stranger on the other side of the world. The only thing you can do when the universe, or God, or whomever or whatever deals you that kind of hand is to relinquish control. To let go. This was a drawn-out process, like untangling a chunky dread-lock, but eventually I freed myself from my warped concept of myself that I'd created. Like I'd birthed a brand new slippery, shiny version of myself. Being a father helps you reconnect with a clean slate, a tabula rasa! It helps you get back to this place that you were before all the conditioning and confusion. Before the ego takes hold! Then you can start anew, but with the knowledge that you've accrued along the winding way. Y'know? 

BOWIE: You delivered your best friend’s eulogy on the same day that you met your daughter, Juniper. Did you start composing the album very long after? 

MCKEE: I began writing the album prior to this actually. I wrote a song on the album that is sung from the perspective of an unborn child in his mother's womb, before knowing I was becoming a father. Some weird prophecy. I keep having these prophetic dreams that are absolutely useless to me. Pointless prophecies. I'm a pointless prophet. 

Anyway, Juniper's birth and Matt's death were interconnected. He was also becoming a father at the time of his death and he actually introduced me to the mother of my child. My psychic friend called me recently and told me that I was Matt's mother in a past life. I don't know what that means, but I think I understand. 

So to answer your question, the album was written, before, during and after those events. So it tells the whole story in some warped and mangled way.

BOWIE: This is the second solo album you’ve released since parting ways with your former band, SNOWMAN. Would you say that your personal growth has been an analogue to your growth as a musician, or do you feel like music has acted as a sort of constant in life that helps you navigate the rest? 

MCKEE: That’s a good question. I suppose you might be onto something there. I suppose my music has become more like me in some sense. I’ve been following a thread for long enough that I'm in a place creatively that I don't know if anyone else is at. It's just a little nook somewhere that feels like home. Don't get me wrong, we're all just regurgitating our various influences, but at some point you get to a place where you've forgotten what they were, and what you are making feels like it belongs to you and only you. I'm a less frightened and significantly happier person than I was in my SNOWMAN daze. I don't think it's a coincidence that my music has become less frightening and more colorful as time has passed.

BOWIE: Do you find the composition process to be very fluid and organic, or does it tend to be very labor-intensive?  

MCKEE: It's both really. There is fluidity in the conception of an idea, but the execution is laborious. The most enjoyable part of making music is when an initial spark becomes a flame, and hey presto! a song is born. The rest is quite a painful process and it doesn't come naturally to me at all. It's work. The song "I'll Be Your Host" is about the birth of a creative idea, and the eventual letting-go of that creation. It no longer belongs to me after the initial burst. I'm not terribly interested in touring these songs live and playing them ad nauseum to vaguely interested drunk people because that seems so far removed from that "first spark" moment that I'm talking about. Perhaps I'll just play private one-on-one performances for a person in my garden. Then it still feels sacred or something. Perhaps I'm rambling.

BOWIE: Your lyrics and song titles have a certain cryptic vulnerability to them. Is this intentional?  

MCKEE: hmmm... It's inherent, I'm not sure it's intentional. It sounds utterly trite but music really is a form of catharsis for me.... but I'm not particularly fond of that confessional style of songwriting, so there's always a veil of some sort. I have to wrap metaphor in cataphor in metaphor to feel as though I'm saying anything in a way that feels unique or unburdensome. Is that a word? I don't want to burden people with my crap. I want to sort through it, turn it into something magical and share that, y'know. It's digestion! Songwriting (or creation in any form) is like a digestive process. The final release is the turd that I've presented to you! All the garbage that I need to release! Flushing it into the world. Magical crap. Perhaps childbirth is a nicer analogy. 

BOWIE: “A Yolk He’d Never Seen” is about people getting their comeuppance and feeling the karmic consequence of behaving like a jerk. Can you elaborate on that? 

MCKEE: Yeah that was the first song I wrote for this record. I was living a life of sin! I was genuinely trying to do things purely for myself even if they hurt other people. I made a conscious decision to do this. Madness! Of course the universe dealt me the hand that it did, and I learned my lesson. So that song is about cosmic/karmic repercussions. I won't go into too much detail, but I hurt someone, and in turn, I was hurt. Egg all over my face. 

BOWIE: Can you talk a bit about the first track you released, “I Want to Be Your Wife,” and its significance to the album? 

MCKEE: I sung it from the perspective of a woman in an unhappy marriage. I was a stay-at-home dad in a peculiar marital situation, but really it's based on every relationship I've been in and that crippling fear of losing oneself to another person. Terrifying stuff. It's a funny song, you should listen to the lyrics. You devote so much to these beings (songs/children), and at some point they have to leave the nest, and you're all alone again! Then you die. 

BOWIE: Let’s talk about your use of reverb. How long have you been experimenting with the effect and do you remember what inspired you to develop this signature? 

MCKEE: Oh yeah, it's another veil, like the cryptic lyrics, it's a way for me to hide behind something. It's just like clothing for me; it feels natural to wear a suit made of reverb. I'd like to thread a sound suit together and wear it, but sound is still invisible, so it'd only ever be a representation of a sound. But imagine that! Joe McKee and his Technicolor Reverb Tracksuit. It'd be like the Emperor's new clothes. I'd be wandering around in my disgusting naked body. People would say, "Put some goddamn clothes on you pallid creep!" and I'd simply reply, "Oh, you can't see the reverb? whats wrong with you? 

BOWIE: Can we expect any more music videos for the album? 

MCKEE: Yeah, one more!

BOWIE: Performances? 

MCKEE: In some capacity. Not in bars though. It just doesn't really make sense for these songs to compete with the alcohol industry. I don't want to be at battle. Being on stage just feeds into this ego-worship thing that I don't think is very healthy for me. So If I play, I'll play on the floor, eye-to-eye and you can have a cup of tea. And you'll bloody well enjoy it.

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