Biomythography
Investigating biomythography as an interdisciplinary visual arts practice.
Influenced by Fluxus and Conceptual Art, Rachelle Rojany has an interest in philosophical investigation, text-based art, sound, and performance. She takes a self-reflective approach to art, creating works that address time, home, relationship, what it means to be human and what it means to be an artist. Her work posits existential and ethical questions about how to be in the world, offering sly shifts in the relationships between artwork, exhibition space, and viewer. Her process involves research and reading and then a distillation that begins to feed off itself. It is contemplative; the intent is the slow reveal, the slow revel. The beginning is either concept- driven or intuitive, evolving out of a material investigation. Even when using industrial materials, there is a sense of fragility to the work that questions permanence.
Rojany creates latent sculptural objects made from a variety of materials such as wood, plaster, mirrors, plexiglass, and paper, kept in their raw state, without adornment. This is often combined with ephemeral performative work—a confluence of material, process, and time that harken to ideas of value and the value of an artwork. Her work has a pared down aesthetic and she considers this a sifting-out of the essentials from the massive amounts of information available today. Similar to how the writer Raymond Carver used an economy of words to convey a plot, she presents a minimal or economical aesthetic.
The scale of the works is either to the body or to the hand, ranging in scope from a poem read to a massive painting on a rooftop. This is always in consideration of the context in which the work is shown, as inspiration, partner, critique, and question. Location, the physical attributes of a space and it’s surroundings, and how the space is used—all accrue and mingle with the sculptures like a Proustian memory palace whose disparate fragments elaborately build on themselves, to complete or open to the possibility of possibility—of psychological, philosophical, even religious experience. Rojany’s work invites the viewer to enter an osmotic experience, an intimate and primal understanding that is always a work in progress. A sense of placed, an unsettling of body and mind, a need to move to move you.