Clare Rojas, the Bay Area-based multidisciplinary artist, refuses to confine her expansive practice to a single medium. Instead, she glides from paintbrush to pen, from camera to guitar (or banjo — she produces bluegrass-infused music under the moniker Peggy Honeywell), and in recent years has become known for creating powerful folk-art-inspired tableaus that tackle traditional gender roles.
But Rojas’s new paintings, drawings, poems and installations, which appear in an exhibition at Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld in New York, mark a shift away from the narrative work she is known for, and toward geometric abstraction. “The process of making abstract imagery is about trying to understand and nurture my natural disposition and attraction to certain color, shapes, patterns, lines, compositions, and allowing that instinct to be enough,” she said. Her bold yet harmonious compositions feature vibrant, angular shapes held in captivating balance through the use of negative space. “The negative space is so important,” Rojas explained. “I see it, and almost hear it, like you would hear the resonance of a sound in space.”
