Current Exhibition

Steve Rogers

Blood At The Roost

April 7 – May 12, 2013
Artist Reception: Sunday, April 7, 5 – 7 p.m.

CB1 Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by artist Steve Rogers, Blood At The Roost. Working the past four years in the Inland Empire, Rogers recent terra cotta works along with gouaches and hand colored, oil over lino- cut work from 2006 to the present, are from his “Inland Empire Bantam Yard” series. The exhibition will be on view from April 7 – May 12 2013. An opening reception for the artist will take place on Sunday, April 7, 2013 from 5 – 7 p.m.

Rogers’ love of story telling combined with memories of time spent in the 1980’s with an old friend chicken Vern, a cock fighter from North Carolina, led the artist to create this ongoing body of work. Vern had two hundred specially bred and trained roosters and would go to farms, barns and garages where Vern would pit his roosters against others. Not a spectator sport, Roger’s states that he felt strangely as if he was in the “twilight zone.” While he has no specific interest in cock fighting, memories led Rogers to create these bas-relief and gouache works.

Maintaining his fondness for observing and exploring conflict, the current work, from his ongoing “Bantam Yard” series, continues Rogers’ desire to create a fiction surrounding chickens and roosters. In 2006 Rogers started making cubist surreal cockerels and at the same time began working with hand colored lino-cuts. Moving away from pure bred looking fowl he began pushing more into abstraction and around 2010 starting making clay figures with a nod to Magritte and Picasso.

Steve Rogers received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has taught sculpture at Otis College of Art and Design. He has had solo shows from 1982 – 1998 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, and also has shown at Louis Stern Gallery, West Hollywood, and Mor York Gallery, Los Angeles. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at various galleries in Los Angeles, San Diego, Albuquerque, San Francisco and Paris. In 1988 Rogers received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.