Clare E. Rojas: Will Poor Will; curated by CCST candidate Liz Bruchet


DATE
Friday May 7, 2004 - Sunday May 30, 2004

Opening Reception:  Friday 7 May 2004   8 – 10 pm. Show runs May 8 to May 30 2004.
Musical Performance by the artist as Peggy Honeywell at 8:30 pm

Will Poor Will is the first exhibition of Clare E. Rojas’s work in Canada. The San Francisco-based artist playfully draws from American craft traditions, country-western aesthetics and classic European fables to create worlds reminiscent of folk stories and fairytales.

Rojas’s work investigates physical, psychological and social landscapes. In her murals and gouache paintings recurring characters journey through uncertain environments encountering birds, sloths, bears and other grimacing creatures. On a handmade stage created for the installation, the artist will give a live musical performance under the persona Peggy Honeywell – a central character in her work. Borrowing primarily from folk and country-western music, Honeywell’s songs accompany the visual narratives with tales of exploration, angst, redemption and love. The exhibition also includes a collaborative film by Rojas and Andrew Jeffrey Wright entitled, Ich bin ein manipulator, a follow-up to their award-winning animated short, The Manipulators.

Clare E. Rojas holds a BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include “Doing my Day” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and “Walk Like Man” at New Image Art, Los Angeles. She has also participated in group exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Deitch Projects, New York.

Curated by Liz Bruchet. This exhibition is the fourth in a series curated by Master of Arts candidates in the Critical Curatorial Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Alvin Balkind Fund for Student Curatorial Initiatives and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia.

749