In her most recent series of drawings and gouache paintings, the artist EMILY ROZ unleashes the fury and frustration of these uncertain times through images of wild animals, blatantly revealing their primordial aggression. These disturbingly captivating images reveal the basest of animalistic impulses. The large scale, highly detailed, and labor intensive colored pencil drawings as well as the smaller scale gouache paintings included in the exhibition Kill the Beast at the Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn, continue on a thread of violence from Roz's earlier photographic work. Her past work at times has mocked our indifference to violent images in the media, Emily Roz now turns to the internal psyche, and how it is reflected within society in terms of natural selection and survival of the fittest.
Taking cues from classic texts like William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica, Emily Roz questions the nature of man, mirrored through these animal stand-ins. As Wernor Herzog states in Grizzly Man, "...the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility and murder."
This exhibition examines the animalistic instincts which are present in our society today, with such intensity and focus, Emily Roz reveals the unpleasant underbelly of nature, which at times like these, is rearing its ugly head.
EMILY ROZ
Kill the Beast
Front Room Gallery, NYC
February 27 - March 29, 2009
Previous exhibition at the Front Room Gallery: SUNG JIN CHOI, The Creator
