Art chose Grace Roselli and not the other way around. Her medium varies but she prefers oil paint, calling it “the Sexiest.” For a seasoned artist such as Grace, “The work moves from the body to machines (camera, computer) to a physical, two-dimensional surface.” She lets her intuition guide her to make the most sense in the moment. Broadly speaking, her artworks navigate the complexities of female agency in contemporary culture. Her paintings, performance and photography is concerned with the slippage between race, gender, and sexuality. Authorship is another hot button issue — “Who has the ‘right’ to talk about what—illuminates societal power structures and personal perceptions,” explains Grace. She’s rode a motorcycle for over thirty years and used body paint as a means of tackling racial issues and gender norms. Her most recent work comes out of an art practice developed over decades, “One in which I lived the subject without filter and that at times has extended my studio practice beyond its walls.” In her large-scale painting “The Implications of Baring One’s Teeth,” facial expressions of fear and anger expose social signals frequently presumed to signify threat to perceivers, playing upon racial stereotypes in an effort to reveal their illegitimate basis in fear and anger. In “The Wide Sargass Sea,” an even larger oil on canvas masterpiece, Roselli nods to the feminist anti-colonial novel by Jean Rhy written in response to Jan Eyre. In the re-framing of the crazy woman in the attic, the master’s tools literally burn down his house. And finally in a third massive work on paper, “Pregnant Woman 3x,” made while the artist was pregnant, reflects on the visibility and invisibility of the pregnant body with respect to race and society. A New Yorker to the bone, Roselli makes physical work in her Brooklyn studio and performances occur wherever “my camera, motorcycle and I end up.” Aside from her current series of paintings, “The Implications of Baring One’s Teeth,” Grace has a new photo series and book titled Pandora’s Box about witnessing and being part of the long overdue rise of female artists, and the women gallerists, critics and collectors who support them.
Follow the artist on IG @gracerosellistudio
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