Few artists make work that both looks good and manages to make the world a better place, but Aubrey Roemer is one such artist. Her artistic career spans oceans and continents, from a strip club in Brooklyn to the sugarcane fields of Nicaragua, and from the islands of eastern Indonesia to the migrant camps of Greece. Everywhere she goes, she uses painting as a way to make genuine connections with people and foster awareness of social and environmental issues both locally and globally.

I first became acquainted with Roemer’s work in the spring of 2014 when she had just moved to Montauk to work on her “Leviathan” series, in which she attempted to paint 10 percent of the town population in the course of a summer. Painted in blue on domestic fabrics donated by the local community, the portraits were installed on the beach where they were free to flutter in the wind, their blue and white forms flickering between sea and sky. I’ve been consistently impressed since then by the way she builds rapport with her subjects and then installs her work with an aim of serving the community that inspired it. Her story illustrates how an artist can change the world, one painting at a time.

Though she’s been painting her whole life, Roemer’s practice of community engagement began in 2013 with the “Demimonde” exhibition at Pumps strip club in Brooklyn. She was invited by Pumps’ pinups director Laura McCarthy to do a solo show of paintings at the club, and the show was such a success that Roemer went on to curate three more exhibitions/burlesque nights there. The shows featured Roemer’s paintings of the dancers alongside work by Brooklyn-based artists such as the painter Jesse McCloskey, who has kept a studio around the corner from Pumps for the past 10 years. Roemer fostered collaboration between two communities that had hitherto coexisted side by side without interacting very much, and perhaps both groups discovered that they had more in common than they might have thought.

Hopping from residency to residency since then, her adventures have become increasingly fantastic and inspirational. With support from World Connect, Roemer traveled to Nicaragua in 2015 to do a project with La Isla Foundation, a non-governmental organization that fights the under-publicized epidemic of chronic kidney disease from unknown causes (CKDu), which is ravaging Central America and other equatorial regions around the globe. It is especially prevalent among agricultural laborers worked to death in hot climates—their kidneys fail, from overwork in extreme heat and possibly also as a result of the chemicals used in industrial monoculture. Because sugarcane is a major revenue stream for the national economy, La Isla Foundation gets far more pushback than support from the Nicaraguan government on the matter.

Roemer spent one month living in the Chichigalpa region, where she watched trucks full of sugarcane rumble past while painting portraits of deceased workers on discarded sugarcane sacks. She also painted protest banners, which have since been used by a local grassroots movement agitating for research on CKDu and compensation. As tensions heightened between La Isla Foundation and the government, she had to leave before the project was complete. Just last month Roemer returned to Nicaragua and displayed the completed works in the ruins of an abandoned church, and then gifted them to the community.

Her next project took her to Indonesia, where she set sail from the island of Lombok with a motley crew of artists on board a traditional wooden phinisi sailboat to explore the culture of the remote eastern islands. During this time Roemer completed another project, titled Maccini Sombala (“Seeing Sails”), in which she traced the hands of the people she met on the islands and printed them directly onto the sails of the boat. She used a range of greens that both reflected the lush environment of the islands and tipped a hat to the Islamic culture of Indonesia. This spring, Roemer will curate the next residency aboard the boat, called the Al Isra, proceeds from which will go towards the installation of a solar-powered trash collection wheel at the mouth of the nearby Mataram River, which it’s estimated will stop 10 tons of plastic from entering the Indian Ocean every day.

After returning to Long Island for the summer, Roemer and her boyfriend traveled to Greece to see how they could be of service to the flood of migrants washing up on the islands. Roemer embedded herself in a refugee shelter for migrant boys on the island of Lesvos. Titling the work Khamsa, she created 99 prayer flags using reclaimed fabric from deconstructed life preservers and emergency blankets. The “Khamsa” is a North African talisman of a hand with an eye in its palm, so she traced the hands of 66 women who she met there, and then added images of the women’s eyes to complete the works. The khamsas were also accompanied by 33 prayer flags upon which male migrants were invited to write prayers and protests. The number 99 was chosen to represent the number of beads on an Islamic prayer necklace, and the ratio of men to women was intended to counter the media narrative that portrays the migrant crisis as consisting primarily of men.

After traveling to China to exhibit Khamsa at 203 Gallery in Shanghai, Roemer followed the work back to Greece where it was installed at Athens’ IFAC Gallery, which gave Roemer an opportunity to show Yasamin, a girl she had met in a refugee camp and who had become her assistant for the project, their work installed in a professional setting (though only through Whatsapp, as Yasamin was still held in immigration custody on Lesvos). Reflecting on the project over Skype, Roemer told me “The most important form of contemporary art I could make, the most compelling thing I could possibly do, was to be standing by this young girl’s side and making art with her. It actually didn’t matter what it was at all, just the fact that I was standing next to her.” Proceeds from sales of the work go to Greek NGO Desmos, which is active on the frontlines of the refugee crisis.

In his 2006 book of collected essays, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight, the poet and critic Alan Gilbert suggests that art can serve as a means of “imaginative resistance” to the systemic problems that plague our world, through “tactics imaginatively employed on a daily, local, and global basis (with the knowledge that when the effects of globalization reside everywhere, local activities have global ramifications and vice versa).” This is what Aubrey Roemer is doing with her painting practice, through which she not only publicizes relevant issues affecting marginalized communities, but also directly empowers and uplifts the members of those communities with whom she works. This is contemporary art at its finest.

The post Aubrey Roemer: Helping the World, Painting by Painting appeared first on artcritical.

Carlos Rigau is a Cuban-American artist, raised in Miami’s Little Havana and currently based in Brooklyn. He works principally (though not exclusively) with the moving image and what he terms video-sculpture. Rigau co-founded and now runs General Practice, an experimental space in Bushwick dedicated to exploration and collaboration between artists. Rigau also hosts “General Practice Presents,” a New York cable access show filmed at BRIC studios and broadcast on Wednesdays at midnight. The program expands General Practice’s ethos toward collective behavior, and has featured interviews with the Jack Roy collective, artist-run music label Primitive Languages, and end/SPRING BREAK, a Miami/NY artist group.

Underpinning Rigau’s prodigious output is his natural facility as a charismatic social organizer. This manifests through his ability to bring people together via art events, after-parties, and openings, from the Lower East Side scene to major city institutions, where he often DJs. During Art Basel Miami in December, Rigau worked between his solo show, “Santa’s Toy Shop Goes to Cuba,”“at Meeting House, a presentation at Pulse Fair with LMAK Gallery, and an extensively covered — yet controversially cancelled — beachside performance called Dance of the Designer Refugee, for Untitled Fair in collaboration with Helper Gallery. 

Within his own practice, a founding interest and constant theme, is the subject of artifice. Rigau explains: “It’s to do with where I grew up. Artifice is a big part of Miami life, and accepting that aspect of the city is to acknowledge my own upbringing within it and how that background informs my work.”

It was during a trip to Las Vegas — a city that takes artifice to greater excess than perhaps anywhere else — that an informative irony was revealed to him. “I was standing there among these facsimiles of great buildings, these copies of European capitals and iconic works of art — the Sistine Chapel, the garish beauty, the pinging cacophony of slot machines. It just hit me, that it isn’t fake. The facsimile is more lifelike today, certainly in terms of our data selves and the skewed realities we present. The plasticity of Miami (or Las Vegas) is real and it is authentic and it is a great thing — not as a copy of the original Venice or New York, but great in and of itself.”

Relatedly, Rigau looks to the the darker side of Miami life: the extremes of social economics, lurid newspaper headlines, drug use, unusual behaviors. “Sensational things happen in Miami. Maybe it has something to do with its position as an apex of the Bermuda Triangle,” he says. “I love that aspect of Miami that is like an adolescent looking for attention.” This too percolates into his working method, so that a thread of discontent is extant. He asks “Why do so many weird things come out of the city?” He aims to locate the viewer in a moment where accepted understanding of one’s place in the corporeality of daily life is jarred or shaken by confrontation with the unexpected, the esoteric or even the mystical. “The frustration of the underclass and the anger permeating some of my work is an outcome of the artifice. It’s not an antidote — it’s an outcome. I want to create through artifice, and to create some kind of disturbance in the everyday.” That attitude is exemplified in Rigau’s current solo exhibition “Delusions Through Details” at LMAK Gallery in New York.

The exhibition consists of a single video sculpture with two projections, seen from opposite sides of the gallery. The films are housed in a box-like structure typical of department store-style Formica display pedestals. One video shows a window with an unremarkable urban view across city buildings. Through extensive editing, the scene becomes dislocated, as layers, including crackling bubble wrap, appear to obscure the window. Strange symbols of an unfamiliar language emerge on the panes, and spots of melting flames drip and sizzle in gravity-defying directions. The other screen shows a model skull on a white workbench, replete with hat and pin, in enigmatic, muted colors. An aproned figure standing behind the skull begins to break it apart, fingers frantically working, until it is in pieces, at which point the video reverses and the skull is marvelously reformed, as fragments of Styrofoam cranium weld back together.

Both videos are so painstakingly altered from their opening frames that visual understanding is arrested and any linear narrative of what is happening is corrupted. “Everyday materials sometimes are charged with something beyond their functionality,” he explains. “When I’m around bubble wrap, I want to pop it. It is at the point where your senses are fully engaged, that things start to feel otherworldly.” A potent aspect of the work is the seeming contradiction of quotidian items and magical symbolism. “Through editing and shooting, the image reveals optical tricks,” says Rigau, “as when a glass in front of the window ‘breaks’ and the viewer sees another layer of glass behind. Other times layers are removed by ‘cheesy’ artificial editing effects. These approaches to editing add up to an affect of disembodiment upon the viewer.”

“Some members of my family have practiced African-Caribbean religions such as Palo and Santeria. For example, you’re driving your new car and you feel under the seat and find that there’s a decorated coconut shell, and you think, How did that get there? It turns out to be a good-luck amulet — blessed, I believe, by Elegguá, the custodian spirit of travel — and placed there without telling the recipient, Rigau says, returning to his familial and cultural background in Little Havana to provide insight into this area of his work. “This interaction with an unknown realm pierces the humdrum of what we expect while driving from A to B. That has imbued me with an acceptance of a certain darkness in life. I’m not a practitioner of these beliefs, but they are a part of my early experience and I do think that there is a supernatural world, or a not visible or understood world.” 

Ultimately, Rigau considers artistic process to be art world language for what could be more accurately described as “ritual.” His ritual — subtly informed by autobiographical, magical and historical frameworks — involves a constant process of making and destroying within the physical backdrops he sets up for his videos, similar to the way that a priest or shaman would set up specific environments to aid the practice of their rites. The results are often mesmerizing spatial and dimensional experiences where visual uncertainty and symbolic motifs cause a temporary fusion between the familiar tropes of daily life, and unknown planes that may lie just beyond our comprehension.

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