Night Gallery is pleased to announce LaRissa Rogers’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Dust of the Streets.

Bringing together ceramics, painting, photography, and architectural installation, Rogers assembles a multimedia exploration of personal and collective history and memory, social intimacy, and the collaborative work of repair that responds to injury with creativity and care. At the center of the gallery, a towering gazebo anchors the space. A freestanding structure often found in public parks and gardens, gazebos function as intermediary spaces wherein public and private intimacies collide. In Rogers’s installation, it is precisely in the gazebo’s potential to facilitate a heightened mode of attention and communion that it becomes a venue for unworlding and reworlding.

Drawing from her mother’s personal history as a transnationally adopted mixed-race Korean person, Rogers surfaces the overlapping forces that scaffold her mother’s forced displacement from Korea after the Korean War. Multiracial children accounted for the majority of overseas Korean adoptees in the immediate postwar period, as their racial heterogeneity was perceived as a threat to the homogenous ethnoracial Korean state. As such, mixed-race Korean children were racialized as invasive and illegitimate: they were “dust on the streets.” The exhibition title takes the history of this term as its departure point to explore the weight of what Rogers’s mother inherits upon her arrival in America.

In conversation with her earlier work that engages with the biblical creation story in which all humans are formed from dust, Dust of the Streets emerges as a call-and-response. Through Rogers’s interpretation, the creation story’s powerful assertion of our collective lifemaking grounds us in service of a common good: the recognition and flourishing of all peoples. From this orientation, Dust of the Streets, then, offers a radical reframing. A label that was once intended as an insult transforms into a declaration of truth. At its heart, Dust of the Streets deepens a central question: In the wake of profound injury and trauma, how do we carry pain and still build lifeworlds with and around it? Put differently, how does one mend a broken spirit?

Throughout Faithful and True, seemingly two-dimensional archival photographs of Rogers’s mother as a young child prior to her adoption from Korea, which Rogers has painted over and layered with ceramic roses, reveal surprising texture and coagulated life. Her mother’s words are screen-printed on the photograph-paintings, forming a multi-layered assemblage that carries not only a record of her grief and loss, but also, instructions for how to recognize the political other as, in Angel Parhams’s words, “a person of care, interest, and concern.”

For Rogers, the moon jar, a type of traditional Korean white porcelain celebrated for its embodiment of Confucian ideals of modesty and simplicity, is a form that continuously intervenes in her artistic practice. These vessels appear as centerpieces to the installation, forming the bedrock of the gazebo. While the moon jar has become a national icon of Korean aesthetic beauty, Keloid XIII Moon Jar (dust of the streets) and Keloid XV Moon Jar (a new creature) are lush with growths and appendages, which, upon closer inspection, are, in fact, porcelain roses. And, in Keloid XIV Moon Jar (ruptured inheritance), Rogers uses slip-cast porcelain replicas of the handles of different domestic tools from her inherited family heirlooms—a sad iron, cast iron skillet, fire poker, handsaw, and hand hoe—to adorn the vessel. These all form what she describes as “scar tissue,” whereby the unruly congealments of porcelain and ceramic glaze transform the vessel into both wound and ornament. It is precisely through the aesthetic distortion—a kind of contamination—of the traditional moon jar form that Rogers engages with histories of transpacific violence and also, crucially, methods of healing and repair.

Indeed, in Fingers of God, Rogers constructs a wallpapered portrait wall composed of extensive porcelain copies of the only surviving heirlooms in her family, dating back over 200 years. In doing so, she explores how histories of labor—and their dignity and vitality—scaffold her family’s transatlantic and transpacific lives. Inheritance, here, is not simply about possession, but rather about profound intimacy and responsibility. By reframing inheritance as a kind of caregiving, Rogers thus presses us to take seriously our interdependency as knowledge for how to live on and through ongoing, everyday crises.

From the otherworldly weightlessness experienced while trampoline jumping to quiet moments of hand-held intimacy, Dust of the Streets invites us to gather and rest together. We need somewhere to land, and a safe landing requires trust and the endurance to reach across the wound of our distance, again and again.

—Claire Chun

LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996, Virginia) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, MA; Super Dakota, Basel, Switzerland; and New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Documenta 15, Germany; Weserburg Museum, Germany; the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA; the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; and the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA, among others. Rogers was named in Forbes' 2024 "30 under 30" list in the Art and Style category. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center and has held residencies at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME; and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. Rogers has been featured in The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar Japan, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, ARTSY, New American Paintings, Boston Art Review, and The Boston Globe. She received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a tenure-track Assistant Professor and Head of Sculpture at the University of Virginia.