Licked Until Your Tongue Rubbed Raw, 2022
15 Handmade and painted porcelain plates, candied brown sugar skins, saliva, unplugged microphones.
Images courtesy of Second Street Gallery and Images Taken by Stacey Evans.
Images courtesy of The Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art. Images Taken by Nicholas Lea bruno.
Rogers places candied sugar skins of her body on porcelain plates. The plates act as a vestibule, actively shaping and materializing the corporal body, where ingestion and edibility come infused with racial embodiment. The porcelain plates recall the 17th-century chinoiserie and sugar pastillages that have been consumed by Euro-Westerners at the expense of Black and Brown laborers and fetishized Asian peoples. Together, the porcelain and sugar call to attention the materials’ common histories in labor and commodification of people of color and their uses as decorative status symbols for Euro-Westerners translated into today’s interior aesthetics. As the sugar melts, Rogers disallows the containment of Black and Asian bodies, while the unplugged microphones memorialize once-silenced voices and, through their failure to capture the sugar’s drips, prime a space for transcendence and new genealogies.