SALZBURG.- In her works, Bunny Rogers (b. 1990, Houston, Texas) plays with notions of identity and addresses sensitivity and vulnerability, nostalgia and outsider status. Inspired by figures from the internet, TV series and video games, the artist interweaves reality and fiction to reflect on experiences of loss, alienation and community. For her most recent series, Rogers was inspired by Clone High, an animated series featuring a high school populated by clones of historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. The cult MTV series has been the artist‘s starting point for several works in which she has repeatedly appropriated the figure of Joan of Arc as a kind of alter ego.

Bunny Rogers explores the visual fabric of and the abysses beneath the polished surfaces of digitally optimized bodies and sterile faces. Formative contemporary discourses resonate in this work: How do the increasingly blurred boundaries between the digital world and real life affect our perception of both? How does celebrity culture influence our attitudes towards social and socio-political issues, such as the recent controversies surrounding the celebrity feminism of high-profile female entertainers?

As Bunny Rogers has stated, viewing life as theatre creates a distance that allows one to process an otherwise suffocating environment of extremes. By spinning popular culture and personal experiences into a web of associations, the artist exposes not only contradictions but also the collective construction of social norms and cultural memory.

Bunny Rogers’ works are represented in distinguished institutional collections and shown in museum exhibitions worldwide, including comprehensive solo shows at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2015); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Zollamt MMK, Frankfurt am Main (2019); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2020) and most recently at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2020—2021)