Fraught with ecstasy, agony, ruin, and rapture, meat is a ripe terrain for Fawn Rogers. She extends—and egresses—the metaphors of consumption in her epic Car Meat sculpture.

Made by sourcing the hoods of cars that have been in accidents, Rogers butchers them into choice cuts, then meticulously sands and lacquers them with fine pearl metallic auto paint. These fetish finish objects are then placed onto actual meat hooks on handmade trolleys, which hang and roll along a steel rack that extends eight feet into the air. Car Meat grinds the works of John Chamberlain, Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly—a towering trio of American Modernism—into a feminist palette drawn from the coat of the Akhal-Teke, known as "the pearl horse" for its distinctive metallic sheen.

“I'd stay there late into the night with a sense of freedom in the dark, in the dew, and that primal, lush carpet surrounded by burnt, crushed cars and horses,” says Rogers, noting these wild grasses also blanketed a neighboring junkyard filled with abandoned automobiles that were sold for scrap, many punctured by mature ash and maples growing through their windows or trunks.  Wild horses roamed the coastline, and children were free to run with them. 

This collision of childhood references and real-world destruction forms the crux of Rogers’ multimedia artistic practice, which operates on the razor’s edge between the sublime and the abyss.

Grass is the living canvas in which this series unfolds, giving rise to elements that are ancient, authentic, and organic, as well as those that are new, artificial, and human-made.  The artist centers the immortal rigor of grass; the primal lush carpet that caresses the earth and softens the shells of manufactured existence as they wreak havoc on her landscape.