KC Rosenberg

Initially, this work was inspired by a reoccurring dream, where my mother visits me on a porch swing, her sister is there with an added woman, usually someone from my life that I recognize also as dead.  It is the same porch each time. I never go onto the porch and the repartee of the three women always seems so inviting. When I try to converse with them I awake searching to remember the things they’ve said to me.  I wade through the ethereal passage of the dream to hear the crisp reality of the words.

In these recent works, I conjure up questions of whether there are intuitive shared spaces that exists past my being, similar to those who believe in talking to the dead.  If this becomes the set understanding for this exhibition, then the conversation in the room of this work could be a channeling with the audience who stand in for the entities of roaming spirits. The works are based on proximity and associations providing the ether for the phenomena of interpretation. The color palette sets a dream scene where the paintings, objects and signs, live as characters within a poetic conversation between text and image.  The reminder of the importance of the instant is in this work.  The exhibition sparks the question that there may be intuitive strata, an elusive state of communication with viewers; whether that is past, future or the present, concrete.

Washed Away: The Bachelorette's Ballad, Rather

I’m not a songwriter but this work is my break up ballad, a love song, gone, beautiful and wronged, but gone just the same. In the ways that Adele, Billie, Etta, Patsy and (even Taylor) wane, I have considered these women’s songs in this work. These songs have strong voices with a shared story and there’s a magnetic quality to the process of loss in their songs that makes me want to lie on the floor and listen.

The large installation centerpiece, hangs in a grand gesture that is engendered. The ballad could be "She is there day and night, her vision, insight and view emerging from the process." A window, removed from its simple original use, has joined a more organic and complex world on loose canvas that has been soaked and washed multiple times, literally. There is a reframing of the view through my process and from the ground up into the air. Though scrubbed and worn on the edges, indelible colors and iridescence remain as beautiful memories that can't be removed. 

Logically, the work in many ways is not a song, it is a visual experience and through the process of making the work, there also arose a strong reference to Marcel Duchamp's famous glass-panel installation "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even", which was completed in 1923. In my mind that was a man who arranged the elements of his work to stand in for some event gone awry, she’s been stripped bare?  In this installation and series of paintings, entitled "Washed Away: The Bachelorette's Ballad, Rather", a construct is: a frame, a window, a song, and an audience in the installation that invites a narrative but it is only complete through the viewer, to look at the possibility that RATHER than loss, there is strength coming through to resilience. 

by RoCoCo, collaborative work with Modesto Covarrubias

http://rococoprojects.com/home.html

Curator statement for There Is No 'Why' In Forgiveness

There Is No ‘Why’ In Forgiveness is a response to the recent church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina and how the families who lost loved ones were able to find grace in their loss through forgiveness. Listening to NPR recordings of the families’ voices as they struggled and ultimately succeeded in forgiving the shooter inspired Rosenberg and Covarrubias to explore the “structure of their forgiveness” and attempt to create a physical presence that could represent such a complex emotional state. As artists, they wanted to know what forgiveness looked like, how it felt, sounded, tasted and smelled. Their installation offers the beginnings of an answer and involves multiple dimensions – 1D text cards, 2D paper and textiles, 3D layered columns, 4D video showing the compression of those layers and the 5D emotional power of their chosen subject.

The installation suggests that forgiveness begins dark and heavy, uneven, and awkward at the foundation, and then over time, it rises slowly upward, layer by layer. As it rises, it becomes lighter, more transparent and reflective until it achieves what can be considered “a state of grace.” This single column of layered textiles and tracing paper stretching up to the highest point of the gallery (and beyond) represents both the structure and the power of forgiveness. What Rosenberg and Covarrubias have learned in the process is that if we hold onto violence and hate it benefits no one – it only extends that violence and hate to others and that by forgiving others, we also forgive ourselves.

-Mara Holt Skov

Curator, Adjunct Professor in Graduate Studies, Industrial Design and Critical Studies at CCA

August 2015

When my mom persuasively said, "it's Casserole Night!",  it meant she'd be rehashing leftovers into a new meal in order to save time and resources. Casserole Night is a series that comes of a driven challenge to use every drip of paint and put every studio move and impulse into a work. Layers of grids and dots in vibrant, active repetition become an ordering of instances: breath suspended, pattern shifted... encapsulating life's tiniest and yet momentous evidence into one-pot canvases. Nothing goes to waste, as I allow the momentum or excess of one canvas to become the basis for the next, with not a single gap between starting and ending the works.

 I am questioning my involvement in the erudite practice of painting by mucking up the sink with grit and irony; titles such as Adios Sunset Surprise, Train Wreck Dinner, and Upsy Downsy World Goo are cookbook readymades chosen after the abstractions are complete. Historically, casserole titles reflect an ethno-pot of American homogenizing and the humor of everyday life. Everything tastes better with a gooey surprise or a secret ingredient.  Abstract expressionism, conceptualism, and cheese, are all part of my artistic pantry. Casserole Night is an open-duration series that began in 2008 with a comprehensive exhibit at Mercury 20 Gallery 2015.

For the exhibition A Common Thread, artists Modesto Covarrubias and Mercury 20 member KC Rosenberg collaborate as long time East Bay residents.  The collaboration was borne from a conversation about creativity and culture in the Bay Area, particularly concerning the shift of the region’s cultural center from San Francisco to Oakland.  Their work takes its cue from the way the area has begun to reshape along the urban grid, and the revitalization of areas into new hot spots stacking up on the layers of history. 

The culmination of their collaboration is entitled Urban Abstraction.  Rosenberg and Covarrubias decided on a framework to begin the piece and over the course of several months they independently developed a section of the artwork.  Conversing throughout the project, each began to reconsider, borrow, and merge their ideas and materials. The light translucent material forms a stitched grille and the more dense matter piles up to intersect at places, conveying that it is not one or the other that is more important but the interchange that formulates the final installation.

Urban Abstraction is a site-specific piece that has been assembled for the first time within the gallery space of Mercury 20.

Bold Journeys was the title of my social studies book in middle school, and I recently came across a hard copy that was the inspiration for these pieces. Thinking about middle school then and now are underscored as I witness my middle school son struggle through a surplus of information. In this series, I juxtapose a printed word  with a historical moment, signified by the title of the work.  This loosens the content and  creates space for new meaning. The obsolete Homestead Act of 1862 has been borrowed to comment on the financial crash and the foreclosure of homes in current times.  The present and the past are seamed together, pressed and dripping.

I engage in mapping the garment by cutting the dots out of the dress. it seemed that this was all I was compelled to do.  One dot after another, it gave me a laugh, pleasure and blisters.  I thought it was the dots that were the focus, and stacked them like coins. Then “Illumine” revelation! The result of cutting something away gained the light as connection between the removed and the remaining matter.

Small snip-its or tellings from everyday objects are flipped through a series of signifying games until many layers of meanings are possible.  By transposing the material, the understanding of the original use is changed and sustained into moments of believability, perhaps even nostalgia. The combination of elements from sculptural to flat prints, establish evidence of absence, regained light, and impressed memories.

Social Justice is a way to walk in this world. I note places in the most personal of language that question the strength of my decision making and daily being. I'm flashing back to melodramas of the amnesiac protagonist, the anxious wife and other gaslight lexicons.  These works on paper are created to freeze the moment, restructure the statement or the images and directly apply confidence and poetics.

2010 - current

Over the years, each time I go to visit my sister’s place, Cooper’s Keep, I’ve sat quietly and observed the view. “The Ridge,” is at the top of Palo Colorado Canyon in Big Sur, CA. Painting from nature has become a ritual for me and is connected to this family property. It is the only place so far that gives me this affordance. When I sit with paper and watercolors at my disposal, the water on the paper moves like the change in the day. It is important not to rush in my observations. The ocean’s horizon can go silver quickly and the fog can roll up like a blanket over the mountains. Some times my attention is drawn to a tree cluster of red Madrones, noticing and noting Big Sur.