ARTIST STATEMENT BY ROSABEL ROSALIND

Using drawing, painting and installation, my work allegorizes an unorthodox mythos in which the mundane imitates the spectacular, humor recontextualizes history, and optical illusion skews the familiar into a hyperbolic horror vacui. Informed by diasporic storytelling traditions, absurdist conspiracy theories and personal and cultural memory, my images realize a sublime universe unraveled by the theatrics of Hollywood, the bible, and the climate crisis. In mythologizing autobiographical and historical narratives, my work animates the inanimate with a melodramatic cynicism and sacrilegious sarcasm, playfully fusing notions of good versus evil, kosher versus unkosher, and sacred versus profane. Humor serves a survivalist role in my work; through melodrama, irreverence and subliminal messaging I dismantle patriarchal hierarchies of power and disarm the anthropocentric and white supremacist ideologies that plague the planet’s most vulnerable.