Outset Germany_Switzerland was pleased to acquire ‘Creepy Crawlers (Giant Squid)‘ (2019) by Bunny Rogers for the collection of the Museum Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt, following her solo exhibition ‘Pectus Excavatum‘ curated by Susanne Pfeffer at MMK.
In the work of Bunny Rogers, affect, experience, identification and community, fiction and reality, imagination and physical presence merge into a present subject whose altered perception represents an entire generation. The real constitutes itself by permanently overlapping with the symbolic and the imaginary. The relative emphasis assigned to the relationships between each of these three elements depends on the individual as well as on his or her presence.
We have little knowledge about the invertebrate beings in the pitch-black depths of the oceans; all the wilder have we imagined them for centuries. Giant squids, for example, have never before been seen in their own habitat, only debilitated and confused in harbours or dead on beaches or in the stomachs of sperm whales. As studies of smaller squids show, their sensoria and their brains are highly sensitive, their perception finely discriminating. Their eyes — extremely responsive owing to the relatively low degree of light loss — have insights into the abysses of the seas that remain hidden to us.
In her exhibition ‘Pectus Excavatum‘, the American artist Bunny Rogers created a landscape that subtly intertwined inside and outside, mountain peaks and ocean depths, thus exposing the framework of our conceptions of nature — as precise as they are oversimplified — in which knowledge and experience are inseparably linked with the imagination. Smells gave rise to memories, hands froze in ice. All elements were situated on the boundary between naturalism and fiction; they were both physically present and digital, both experiential space and two-dimensional images.
ON VIEW: 26th January — 28th April 2019
Bunny Rogers (b. 1990) lives and works in New York. She graduated from Parsons School of Design in 2012 and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.