DAVID ROGERS
ENDLESS SHRIMP
Opening Reception:
Saturday November 3, 6-8pm
November 3 – 25, 2018
M E N
13 Monroe Street, New York NY 10002
M E N Gallery proudly presents Endless Shrimp, an exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist David Rogers. In his first solo exhibition with M E N, Rogers offers new works in his ongoing painting series concerning American commerce, consumption, and the appeasement of our collective national vices.
Including imagery of processed foods, security camera footage, and text, the works in Endless Shrimp focus on the desperation and latent violence inherent within many forms of American convenience and exchange. Commodities and profits made on the backs of cheap, overseas labor, retail outlets and eateries staffed by underpaid and overworked part-time employees, and an ever rising economic disparity within the American populace, are subjects that form the core inspirations at the heart of this work.
Taking its name from the weekly dinner special of a ubiquitous chain of seafood restaurants, Endless Shrimp includes new works wherein painted, mass-produced food stuffs commingle with abstract representations of commercial freight and shipping backdrops as well as Xerox image transfers of fast food and convenience store robberies. These latter images suggest a logical apex of financial disproportion, desire, power (or lack thereof) and desperation. Gathering source material equally from childhood memories, perambulations through industrialized Brooklyn, web searches, and journeys across the suburban American West, David Rogers examines the making of the “American Experience” from the vantage point of critical observer and participant, foregrounding the absurdity, contradiction, irony, and brutality embedded within so many aspects of American consumer culture.
David Rogers is an artist whose work deals with themes of authority, power, and the absurd. He received his B.A. in Studio Art from San Francisco State University in 2016. He has exhibited at numerous venues including Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, The Hole, New York, NY, Rod Bianco Gallery, Oslo, Norway, The Martin Wong Gallery, San Francisco State University, CA, and I.M.A.G.E. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY among others. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
M E N is a contemporary art gallery located at 13 Monroe Street in the Two Bridges neighborhood of New York City, presenting singular artistic gestures by emerging and mid-career artists in a purposefully-small storefront exhibition space. M E N seeks to support exceptional work and the artists that produce it while standing in solidarity with feminist, queer, multicultural, indigenous, and other underrepresented voices within the larger cultural conversation. M E N is Molly Krom + Enrico Gomez + Nick De Pirro.
David Rogers : Endless Shrimp is on view at M E N (13 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002) from Nov 3rd – Nov 25th 2018 weekends noon-6pm and by appointment. For further information please contact the gallery at press@13monroe.men or at +1.917.719.1447. All images are subject to copyright.
www.13monroe.men
(image: David Rogers, Fast Food Robbery, 2018, Spray paint, ink, and image transfer on panel, 22 x 15 inches.)