ART-PRESENTATION: Bunny Roger-Pectus Excavatum

A rising figure of the so-called post-Internet generation, Bunny Rogers works independently in different creative fields, through a variety of forms and channels, with information technology occupying a central role. Sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, animated films, websites, 3D modelling, poems and publications in both physical and virtual form: Rogers’ creations make up a strangely familiar world, fuelled by varying but specific references.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MMK Archive

Bunny Rogers, grew up with the Internet, and it remains, like a childhood friend, both her refuge and catalyst. Her first forays into artmaking came through her experiments on Neopets.com, a website that allowed her to create and care for her own virtual pets. As with many children of her era, she was an outlier in high school, but found herself online, and in whichever guise she assumed. 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 harbors 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” Bunny Rogers is creating a landscape that subtly intertwines 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. Role-play and storytelling are central to the approach of Bunny Rogers, her works can be considered “collages” of her different “selfs” filtered through a fertile imagination that feeds off social networks and the Internet. Recurrent themes include experience, memory, community life, friendship, emotions and identity. Her work is marked by a certain existential anguish, in which the personal and the universal, reality and fiction, blur into and feed off each other.

Info: Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Zollamt MMK, Domstraße 3, Frankfurt am Main, Duration: 26/1-28/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.mmk.art