Kilgallen and McGee loved the tapes they received from this “secret country singer,” an alter ego whom Rojas called “Peggy Honeywell.” A cross-country exchange of music, art, and ideas developed. A fan of Bay Area artists Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee, she began sending them recordings of her music-another aspect of her practice she’d begun to explore. Rojas moved to Philadelphia after her time in Chicago and began corresponding and exhibiting with the artists who’d become her creative community. While Rojas went on to formally study painting in grad school, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she credits the rich layers and provocative color combinations of her practice to her printmaking beginnings. “All I did was draw lines, and I couldn’t take it.” The painting program was full by that point, so she opted for printmaking instead it was a completely new medium to her. “I lasted five hours, I was in tears,” she said of her first graphic design class. She won a scholarship to RISD, hoping to pursue painting, but the pragmatism of her Midwestern parents steered her towards graphic design. When Rojas began making art, elements of these formative folklores and landscapes emerged in her work. Summers, on the other hand, were lush, humid, and alive with fireflies, snakes, and thunderstorms. This imaginative atmosphere was reinforced by the surrounding Ohio landscape, where winters were cold and sparse but dotted with red cardinals and geometric painted barn quilts, almost incandescent against gray skies. Both parents also made music, gravitating towards Peruvian and Mexican folk songs and American country ballads, in which powerful emotions are reduced, like long-simmering sauces, into pared-down lyrics and chords. Her father told Peruvian fables, full of magical realism and animism, passed down from his family. Rojas’s mother, a teacher, brought home scores of illustrated books in which the stories “were reduced to their core essences in a really beautiful, lyrical, poetic way,” Rojas remembered. Her American mother and Peruvian father each brought unique approaches to the tales they told their daughter. Rojas was raised in southern Ohio by a family of storytellers. The latter will give her a solo show in the spring of 2023. After working with Deitch Projects and Kavi Gupta Gallery at the beginning of her career, Rojas is now represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco and Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York. “There’s been no real shift in my intentions of making work,” she explained, “but over time, painting more and more, you learn new languages.” The art world has gradually rewarded Rojas for these efforts. While Rojas’s work has indeed matured over her career, these qualities have remained welcome constants-the essence of her practice. The artist creates a rich, painterly language that layers bold expanses of color, hypnotic geometric arrangements, emotionally complex figures, and storytelling that marries magical realist fables with contemporary experience. exhibition, which brings together the full range of the painter’s recent work-from narrative and figurative canvases to floating abstractions (all paintings were made this year). Nods to this magical in-between are everywhere in Rojas’s L.A. “I’ve always been searching for that balance, and the magic is somewhere in the middle.” “I think my work has always teetered between chaos and the opposite of chaos. Rojas, who is now 45 (a detail intimately noted in the signature at the bottom of her paintings), has been making work that harmonizes polar opposites-the good and the bad, joy and grief, hope and fear-for nearly 30 years. I guess that holding on, though, is the hope.” “You’re at the end of a road, on the edge of a cliff, at the end of the world.…Everything is holding on for dear life. “This whole series was kind of about the edge, which felt like a good metaphor for the last straw,” she added, citing the fragile state of the environment, fraught contemporary politics, and the anxiety they both provoke.
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