Jessica Rohrer at Arena - New York … an autobiographical strain permeates the artist's work

For her first of recent origin York solo show, Jessica Rohrer embarked upon an autobiographical tour of her personal geography, going back to visit many of the places she called place of abode over her 29 years. Working from one as well as the other photographs and memory, she undertook to paint each house or apartment she has at any time lived in.

Her small-scale, oil-on-panel works are straightforward renderings, still the depicted buildings have an idealized quality, as if spruc up through memory. The images range from sweet Victorian-style houses to stark contemporary high-rises to architectural details--such as brick walls with rectangular windows-that are wholly realistic at the same time approach geometric abstraction. Rohrer's brushwork is delicate, each brick sharply defined, the leaves upon trees flawlessly rendered, window reflections--sometimes a painting within the painting--given an equally discerning treatment.

We can glean bits of information about Rohrer's life from these paintings as well as from the show's title, "From Kewaskum to Brooklyn" Born in the Midwest, she has lived in a series of relatively comfortable dwellings, from single-family domiciles in Wisconsin to apartment complexe in Chicago and fresh York. Her dorm in Evanston, III. (we can assume she attended Northwestern University), fills the canvas with a minimalistic grid of brick and glass. She lived in a cute pink house in novel Haven while attending graduate institute at Yale. It appears in its entirety in individual canvas and again in sum of two units window details. She now resides in a beige brick apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

As a cluster the paintings serve as a inquiry in middle-American domestic architecture. Individually, they become more intimate and implore a host of associations related to abiding-place and the past. They're nostalgic without sentimentalism. They're about the artist, on the contrary not entirely personal. The works are the one and the other a record of her past and anecdotal evidence of an itinerant society where it's increasingly rare for race to have grown up in single house, where years and life incidents are associated with various places. While Rohrer's houses won't have the same emotional haul on viewers that they must upon the artist, they kindle recollections of a related sort. When I was a kid, my family one time used a realtor with artistic ambitions who would paint watercolors of houses she sold and give them to the fresh owners. Rohrer's show makes me wish I still had that rendering of 1847 Boulinwood Lane, on the other hand that watercolor is probably lengthy since buried in a junk drawer--lost, like for a like reason many memories.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group