On View | July 18 - September 28, 2025
Opening Reception | Friday, July 18, 5-7pm | 51 Main St., North Adams
Artist Talk | Saturday, July 19, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm | 49 Main St., North Adams
LaRissa Rogers in conversation with exhibition curators Audrey Lopez and Eunice Uhm
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.
The exhibition title I am too, a piece of clay draws on the biblical encounter between Job—a man tested for his faith—and Elihu,
a younger figure who challenges both Job and his friends. Elihu references the creation
story in Genesis, reminding us that all humans are formed from clay, shaped by the
hands of God who breathed life into us. The title, along with its invocation of the
creation story, underscores Rogers’ ongoing material investigation into the ways in
which the environment—both natural and social—shapes the formation of cultural identity.
Elaborating on Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identities as “the unstable points
of identification or suture […] within the discourse of history and culture,” Rogers
considers the environment as a dynamic force that un/settles social relations and
calibrates cultural negotiations. Thinking with and through the natural and social
environments that reverberate through us, she poses pressing, timely questions: how
might the environment animate alternative ways of knowing and relating to the world?
In what ways does space mediate new forms of sociality? And how does the land/scape
hold us, and how do we hold it in return? In this exhibition, Rogers invites viewers
into a space of indeterminacy, to dwell in the undefined margins, and to listen carefully
to the quiet frequencies of possibility that resonate within the in-between.
I am too, a piece of clay is co-curated by Audrey Lopez and Eunice Uhm. The exhibition is presented as part of MCLA’s MOSAIC program, in partnership with The Rose Kennedy Greenway and Williamstown Theatre Festival.
The exhibition and related programming are free and open to the public.
