Rebecca Rivas Rogers: Grey View
Grey View is MoCA Arlington resident artist Rebecca Rivas Rogers‘ exuberant love letter to the color gray, a record of the abstractions, colors and textures found in America’s constructed spaces and a snapshot of the artist’s creative process. Consisting of photographs, collage and a sprawling site-specific installation, Grey View is an outgrowth of Rivas-Rogers’ ongoing visual investigations into the places that you see on your way to somewhere else.
Initially a landscape painter, Rebecca Rivas Rogers’ work is indebted to the history of painting and her training in graphic design. As a Northern Irish woman living in the United States, Rivas Rogers brings an outsider’s perspective to the provisional spaces that dominate the contemporary American landscape: through Rivas Rogers’ eyes, parking lots, construction zones, chain link fencing and oil stains all become lessons in aesthetics and meditations on the color gray. Rivas Rogers’ observations of these and other American “non-spaces” are recorded in a series of small format photographs on the wall opposite her site-specific installation, showcasing her focus on pattern, texture, abstraction and color.
Rivas Rogers’ installation, meanwhile, eschews conventions of tidiness and perfection, allowing the mess of the artist’s studio to spill out into the gallery. A playful re-imagining of stuff generated throughout the creative process — used paint sticks, empty coffee cups, cardboard boxes and dry wall tape — the Grey View installation possesses its own internal aesthetic and organizational logic. Through it, Rivas Rogers allows audiences to further investigate the idiosyncratic charm and beauty inherent in the things we encounter in daily life.
Could the places that we pass through en route to a grander destination in fact be the main attraction? Can audiences be let into the messy creative process as participants rather than as consumers of a neat, finished product? Rivas-Rogers investigates these ideas and more in Grey View, offering gallery-goers a peek into her thinking mind.
BIO
Rebecca Rivas Rogers is an artist, designer and educator originally from Northern Ireland. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and a BA in Design from Glasgow School of Art. After working in graphic design throughout Britain and the United States Rivas-Rogers became an art educator while living in Colombia, South America. Currently an adjunct professor at MICA and American University, she has been a resident artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Arlington since 2020.
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