Clare Rojas
For Clare Rojas (b. 1976, USA), storytelling manifests in different ways: sometimes visually, as a painting, drawing, or sculpture; or other times musically, as a song. One similarity Rojas has noticed between these various forms of expression has to do with reduction. Her songwriting pares down the essence of a story to something that can be conveyed in minutes, just as the essence of form and line in her abstract visual compositions is reduced to an examination of the tension of balance. Though theoretically reductive, Rojas’ highly individualized visual language also represents an escalation. Each composition proliferates from a personal totemic form un-rooted to figurative meaning, but evocative of the shape of a drop of water or a mountain. The form has evolved over time, from an abstract shape that Rojas instinctively drew to something concrete she began noticing in her everyday visual environment. Says Rojas, “The more I drew it, and meditated on the shape, the more I saw it everywhere I looked. I found it in the figure, in nature, in water, in land, in animals.” Rojas earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been awarded grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and San Jose Museum of Art, CA, among others. Recent projects include a site-specific commission for Facebook Headquarters in San Francisco, CA (2020), the Art in Embassies Program in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico (2018), and the solo exhibition Egret at Kavi Gupta (2018).
