LaRissa Rogers
LaRissa Rogers is a multi-disciplinary, mixed media artist. Spending her childhood in Charlottesville and college in Richmond, her return to central Virginia to quarantine meant an abrupt return to once familiar territory. Seeking to rebuild her sense of practice and art-making, she found community within a sprawling network of artists and collectives. Yet, it was within her fascination with site-specificity and long hours spent outdoors that particularly resonated in her art-making at the height of quarantine.
Exploring Materials
Tracing the histories of colonization, patriarchy, labor exchange, and hybridity, LaRissa moved from painting and printmaking to performing with organic materials. In one piece, she gingerly washes her body with orange juice; in another, she plants her great grandmother’s yucca into a former plantation’s soil. She asserts her body into the physical narrative – her treatment of these objects a continuation of their histories into the stark present. “It’s exciting, and working with organic materials is really rewarding because it’s always changing and living.”
Monuments, Amnesia, and Memory
Charlottesville, already swirling in questions of monuments, history, and white supremacy, became a prime focus for LaRissa’s inquiry upon her return. Born and raised in Charlottesville, the towering symbols to racist, systemic violence were so deeply rooted in the sites and spaces that they became commonplace – speaking to a tradition of forgetting and erasing painful and painfully present histories.
Confronting the erasure embedded in collective memory, LaRissa works in site-specific meanings. As a radical act of resistance and healing, she practices self-care on the Richmond Slave Trail. As an ode to the memory of ancestors, she forms her silhouette out of the soil from Farmington Country Club and Pen Park, former plantation sites turned golf courses.
Yucca Plant: A Living Heirloom
Though LaRissa works with memory and what it means to memorialize, she refuses to specularize death in her art. Moving away from Western ideologies of passive permanence and legacy, she seeks to explore memory as an active process – one that requires continuous confrontation and care. At the center of her recent works is the memory and presence of her great-grandmother. The yucca she plants traces its histories back to her great-grandmother’s garden: “That yucca plant ended up being this archive of her resilience and our relationship, but also required me to care for it... What does it mean to care for this soil or this plant that was never given this tenderness or care when it was alive or living?” LaRissa proposes an alternative memorial, transforming memory from something passive and erased to something that requires confrontation and interaction everyday – something living.