Los Angeles, CA - Kailua, Hawaii, United States
Christy Lee Rogers’ latest collection "Reckless Unbound" once again reshapes the boundaries between contemporary photography and painting. Without the use of post-production manipulation, Rogers’ works are made in-camera, on the spot, in water and at night. Boisterous in color and complexity, Rogers applies her cunning technique to a barrage of bodies submerged in water during tropical nights in Hawaii. Through a fragile process of experimentation, she builds elaborate scenes of coalesced colors and entangled bodies that exalt the human character as one of vigor and warmth, while also capturing the beauty and vulnerability of the tragic experience that is the human condition.
Her unrestrained ability to excite and inflame the senses, while provoking the audience with vivacious movement and purpose, stirs one’s memories of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, and his Massacre of the Innocents; where the drama of bodies straining, cascading and crushed against one another, thunders with heartache from the canvas. These works not only demonstrate her prolific use of the photographic medium to transform reality, but also her ephemeral approach to life itself.
Rogers is a self-taught photographer from Kailua, Hawaii. Her obsession with water as a medium for breaking the conventions of contemporary photography has led to her work being compared to Baroque painting masters like Caravaggio. With an eye for the chiaroscuro qualities of light, her subjects bend and distort; bathing in darkness, isolated by light, and are brought to life by ones own imagination. Rogers’ works have been exhibited throughout the US and Europe and are held in private collections throughout the world. She has been featured in International Magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar Art China, Eyemazing, Monaco Matin, Casa Vogue, Better Photography, Photo Technique and others. Rogers did the album cover art for Deutsche Grammophon and Universal Music's All Baroque Box classical music cd set, and was recently commissioned to shoot water scenes for artist Lola Creel's feature film, featuring poetry by nobel prize poet Octavio Paz and cinematography by Award winning Ron Fricke. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Kailua, Hawaii.
DUNCAN BEEBE FOR EYEMAZING MAGAZINE
“Her work is undeniably contemporary yet also timeless; portions appear to be drawn from the Baroque period, where dynamic movement and overt emotion were at their height. Many have likened her work to the Baroque master Caravaggio, with her emotive dynamism and dramatic use of lighting. Using pronounced chiaroscuro, where light and dark violently contrast, the light in her images appears to alternately engulf the female form or to be on the verge of dwindling to nothing, leaving them alone in the abyss of boundless space. Light isolates her figures, but her use of spotlighting differs from Caravaggio in that it is atmospheric and benevolent; it insulates the figures from the space surrounding them, that empty space which allows light to strike her subjects, not just as transparent dissolvable images of people, but as solid, real, and seemingly impenetrable beings.
Her figures represent something internal and widely experienced. She successfully and intelligently depicts the wordless doubts and dreams that all of humanity is heir to. Beneath the wondrous exterior, at their core, these strange figures are more human than human; their souls are bared and radiant to one and all.”
