Reimagining the state of indeterminacy as a layered space that engenders the potential for growth and renewal, LaRissa Rogers’ I am too, a piece of clay explores undefined marginality as an aesthetic form that generates alternative epistemologies—sensorial, spatial, and affective. Rogers calls attention to the intervals that are often unremarked and overlooked: the negative space between motifs in a pattern, the threshold of the porch that is neither inside nor outside, or the quiet residue of spoken words that linger in the air. For the artist, these in-between spaces articulate a grammar of relationality—an embodied syntax through which we come into connection with one another and the environments that hold us. Rogers materializes these thematic concerns by transforming the gallery into a front porch—an architectural construct historically tied to practices of communal intimacy and shaped by the design innovations of enslaved Black people in the nineteenth century. Accompanying the spatial intervention, the artist brings together a selection of video, sculptural, and wall-based works that collectively invite a mode of attentive, embodied engagement.
Dzidzor has collaborated with LaRissa Rosgers and produced the soundscape for this instillation.