Join us for "Soil as a living archive," a virtual artist talk with New City Arts 2021 Fellow LaRissa Rogers on Thursday, February 25 at 7:30PM EST. Registration is required for this free, virtual event.
During her Fellowship at New City Arts in February 2021, LaRissa will investigate landscapes in Charlottesville, VA where Black life has been seemingly erased. As she continues to explore ideas of amnesia and what it means to be surviving, she turns to the soil as a living archive and method of Black resistance and breath. By conducting interventions with soil in these spaces, she hopes to begin a conversation around visibility, consumption, land, labor, and marginalized voices.
At this virtual artist talk on Feb 25, LaRissa will do a virtual walk-through of her exhibition, followed by a conversation with artist Jackie Amézquita about soil as a material to explore hidden histories, archives, the body, displacement, labor, hope, death, life, resilience, power, and care. Following their conversation, we'll open the conversation up to audience Q/A.
ABOUT LARISSA ROGERS
LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Ruckersville, VA working in performance, video, sculpture, and installation. She received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently pursuing her MFA in New Genres at the University of California Los Angeles.
Rogers’ work looks at the intersections of culture, identity, and embedded forms of colonization expressed through perception and psyche. Combining aspects of memory, history, and personal experience, she delves into what is her blackness by addressing ideas of hybridity, authenticity, and visibility as an Afro-Asian woman. As slavery's ongoing past continues to inform the present, she uses materials that reference past histories and recontextualizes them to articulate ideas surrounding labor, safety, care, healing, resistance, and resilience.
ABOUT JACKIE AMÉZQUITA
Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985) is a Latin-American artist based in Los Angeles, California. Amézquita was born in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and migrated to the United States in 2003. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from ArtCenter College of Design and an Associate degree in Visual Communications from Los Angeles Valley College. She is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in the New Genres program at the University of California, Los Angeles (2022).
Her practice has been influenced by her relationship to borders and displacement, informed by her experiences as an immigrant woman. Amezquita’s work makes use of durational performances, site specificity, and materiality to explore a visual language that rebalances the power of socio-political relationships. This has allowed her to intertwine historical and contemporary references.
Amézquita is interested in exploring the narratives created in these social environments and how socioeconomic differences between power structures affect the relationship between the body and the landscape. Her recent works investigate the actions that influence the process of transformation, informed by the material and the layers that the work involves.
ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP
The New City Arts Fellowship at Welcome Gallery supports six Charlottesville-area artists from January-June 2021 working on projects related to the theme Next Breath: History, Hate, Possibility, written by Maurice Wallace. During their fellowship, artists are working to address the ongoing impacts of systemic racism and the COVID-19 pandemic through creative projects that deeply and imaginatively relate to breath as the essence of life and freedom. Each artist receives one month in 2021 to transform Welcome Gallery into their studio space, a $400 honorarium, a stocked pantry with their favorite snacks, and an opportunity to engage the community with their work at the conclusion of their fellowship.
To learn more about these artists and their fellowship projects, visit our website. Opportunities to engage with their work are ongoing from January-June 2021. The New City Arts Fellowship is supported by a Community Recovery & Catalyst grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and Maurice Wallace and Pam Sutton-Wallace.
