In Dialogue
Rose Briccetti’s interdisciplinary and intermedia practice combines deep historical, artistic, and scientific research with artmaking to re-present natural and cultural histories to question systems of power. Her work surrealistically weaves together strange truths, biology, museology, cultural myths, internet culture, and personal experience using humor and vivid visuals.
Her most recent work investigates the intersection of natural and cultural histories of specific plants or animals. As she spends time studying a particular species, she begins to collect images and ideas into an eccentric taxonomy or visual wunderkammer, combining art history with pop culture, puns, personal associations, art history, academic research, and hard science to create unusual connections. This visual hyperlinking builds a cybernetic or ecological web, operating like Wikipedia links, allowing the traversal of vast conceptual distances with a few clicks.
The dense and layered resulting paintings and installations flatten and remix time, space, and intellectual disciplines, creating strange relationships, as occurs in the digital world. By drawing connections between imagery and ideas across time and space, she draws in viewers with diverse perspectives and emphasizes our connectedness to each other and the natural world. She uses recognizable imagery and iconography with humor and careful technical execution to create work that is both conceptual and accessible. Her work explores and reveals the invisible biases of knowledge and how information is assigned authority in a post-truth world.
Can you tell us a bit about your recent solo show at Freight and Volume?
Last fall I had a show at Freight + Volume Gallery in New York entitled Strange Mythopoetic Fragments… which is verbiage adapted from Carl Jung’s last and most accessible book Man and His Symbols. The show was anchored by two of the large triptych paintings that are part of the major series of works in my practice: Dangling with Carrots and Bougainvillea and Reverse-Drag.
These two are quite large and I know they took you quite a while to complete! Can you talk a bit about the life-cycle of a painting?
My process is wildly labor-intensive and slow; I often say I’ve found an incredibly foolish way to make art, but it’s the work that deep down I feel I need to make, so I keep doing it in spite of myself. The large triptychs I make remix iconography and build narratives around specific species as a kind of synecdoche for the broader environment and its anthropogenic degradation. The first kernels of any idea come from a variety of places–conversations, books, articles, the internet, etc. I’m always looking to learn about plants and animals that have unusual natural and cultural histories, which intersect and overlap in compelling ways. Once I’ve gotten interested in a species, I begin reading and researching to collect facts, stories, and eventually images to build out a narrative. I then spend months using the collected images to create a very detailed collage in Photoshop, which serves as a sketch or ‘drawing.’
The imagery and basic composition are well-established by this digital drawing, but the process of translation into paint is where I decide what gets rendered, how, and why. What do I paint photographically? Loosely or tightly? Aggressively? Softly? Flatly? After hundreds of hours of painting and meditating on the imagery, I end this process by creating an interpretive wall panel that accompanies the final painting. These panels are silly and serious and personal and academic and operate like a map or key to the painting while also poking fun at the whole concept of “museum wall text.” This whole process takes at least a year.
It seems that “research” is a huge part of your work. Not only research for creating a painting, but almost as an occupation for its own sake, almost an artwork on its own. Can you talk a bit about that?
I do think about my work giving equal weight to both research and making. The paintings are labored over and I care very much about hand-making them and about paint as a medium. The research is also very laborious and deep, and I tend to oscillate between intense periods of either making or researching which allows me to really focus on the task at hand. Both tickle different parts of my brain and I think they’re equally valuable for me.
And another question about research: in your work you seem to take interest in academic and scientific research as part of your sources. Then you throw it in a mix with internet memes, and pop-culture tropes. Do you think about it as a kinda anarchistic move? Or is there any hierarchical thought in the way you treat information when translating it into your paintings?
I collect imagery around a specific species and compose the paintings with an eye to iconography; when sourcing images, I try to ask the question “what are the cultural symbols related to this thing that really jump out?” Sometimes the images are literal illustrations, sometimes visual puns or personal references, and sometimes the references are more oblique and their meanings are more layered. I think about the way I connect disparate knowledge, imagery, and sources as being akin to hyperlinking–in the same way you can traverse vast distances in time and space on Wikipedia by clicking links, the paintings confuse time and space and flatten and unify wildly disparate kinds of information.
It’s perhaps inevitable that there are information hierarchies in the work as some images and ideas will hit harder or hold more weight, but I do strive to reject a fair amount of hierarchy and authority by jamming so much varied source material together unified under a single dominating color in a dramatic and epic “capital ‘P’ Painting.”
Your paintings themselves are a bit of wunderkammers. I’ve also seen a show of yours that combined painting within an installation in which many of the physical artifacts of your research were displayed. Where does your interest in museology come from, and how do you see this interest evolving further in your work?
Between undergrad and grad school, I worked as an exhibition designer at a natural history museum. I’d never been particularly interested in life sciences until I was surrounded by truly weird dead stuff all day. Learning the narratives and histories of the bizarre specimens I was working with and figuring out how to make the public care about the natural world absolutely shaped the work I make now.
The very lived and human part of working in a museum has also influenced my work; I spent time seeing how the sausage gets made and understanding the tropes and biases inherent in museums and collections. I do work with sculptural installation and collected physical objects as well; this part of my practice is quicker and more intuitive. I have some ideas for ways to expand the narrativity of this way of making, and will definitely keep investigating methods of integrating the paintings with objects.
Humor bordering with some light madness is distinctive in your work. Tell us a little bit about the things that make you laugh lately.
I’m always laughing about everything! Today I was leaving a friend a voice memo and stepped on a threshold in my house which broke, loudly cracking over the audio recording, so I came up with a spoken word poem on the spot about “Darkening the door at the ‘Floor And Decor’ store.” I live in a hoarder house I’m fixing up in Florida so humor and madness are the waters I’m constantly swimming in!
On one hand your paintings seem quite personal—rooted in your everyday experiences, your collected objects, sometimes even self-portraiture. On the other hand there’s a feeling of multiple browsing histories thrown together into a visual space by AI – kinda collective unconsciousness. What do you make of your place as an artist and a person relative to your work?
I think you’ve articulated something here that is very important in my work, which is accessing some kind of collective or deeply human meaning through highly specific, sometimes personal, and very eccentric means. Of course, AI is trained on human-created content, but sometimes it does those strange, quirky, jarring, uncanny things that feel so weirdly specific that they’re almost personal, and that can have such an emotionally charged impact! And of course, we’re all terrified and amazed and confused, and watching what happens next, but I certainly do love to make something strange and hopefully pungent from aggregated imagery. It’s also just so interesting to watch the emergent visual language coming out of AI in real time.
And to continue in this direction: What’s your take on the post-truth world and where do you see your place as an artist in it?
Living in a time where facts are so abundant and yet so conflicting and contested has made me want to make work that looks at long arcs of history. My paintings reflect on hundreds of years of painting history and narratives about the end of the world which have existed across cultures for thousands of years. I grew up in Missouri hearing about the end times in a place shaped by evangelical christianity set against a natural environment prone to floods, tornados, and cicada emergence events. My high school was a few miles up the road from Times Beach, a Superfund site where birds fell out of the sky and livestock dropped dead. From a young age, I noticed the connections between dark religious and mythological stories and the environment around me, and that most certainly shaped my visual sensibilities as well as the way I think about narrative and truth. Hearing about fire and brimstone and then huddling in the basement during a tornado where the sky turned purple and hail-stones rained down from the sky definitely made me see some kind of truthiness and resonance in mythologies and cultural stories even when I didn’t believe them literally.
What are you working on right now?
I am currently finishing a large banana painting and have two more triptychs in the drawing stage. I’m also working on some new paintings which will rely on collected physical objects and be painted from life.
And finally, who are some artists working today that inspire you?
Umar Rashid, Jim Shaw, Stephanie Syjuco, Danica Lunday, Amir Fallah, and Kayla Mattes to name a few!
Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE
About the Artist: Rose Briccetti is an artist and professor living and working in Florida. She has a BFA from the Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from The University of California, Santa Barbara. Her artwork has been exhibited at venues including Freight + Volume (NYC), The Harn Museum (Gainesville, FL), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), The Art, Design, and Architecture Museum, (Santa Barbara, CA), Glass Rice (San Francisco, CA), The Dickinson Museum Center (Dickinson, ND) The University of California, Santa Barbara’s Special Collections Library (Santa Barbara, CA), PØST (Los Angeles), and Left Field (San Luis Obispo, CA). Her artwork has been featured in numerous publications including Flavorwire, The Advocate, Jezebel, and Apartment Therapy. @rosebriccetti
About the Writer: Vita Eruhimovitz is Los Angeles-based artist, and occasional curator and art writer. Vita was born in Ukraine and grew up in Israel. Through her work, she navigates the tri-lingual mind and non-conceptual states of being. Vita’s background in science and technology inspire and inform her interest in the intersection of biological life and consciousness. Vita holds a BFA from Shenkar College and an MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis, Museum of Design Holon in Israel, Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, and at the San Diego Art Institute Museum. Her work is in private and public collections in the US and abroad. @vita_eruhimovitz
Related articles:
https://artspiel.org/l-w-d-rooted-in-la/#more-22151
https://artspiel.org/shiva-ahmadi-tangle-at-shoshana-wayne/#
https://artspiel.org/art-spiel-picks-los-angeles-summer-group-exhibitions/