Beauty in Humanity: The Art of Christy Lee Rogers

The work of Christy Lee Rogers commands attention. In today’s post-modern art world, where an artist’s self-awareness, agenda, or process can easily take center stage, Rogers’ work is unique in that its greatness comes from its beauty and its power to captivate, penetrate reality, and inspire. A master and visionary of underwater photography, Rogers’ work breaks the conventions of contemporary photography and is rooted in classical aesthetics, often compared to Baroque painting masters like Caravaggio.

Boisterous in color and complexity, Rogers applies her cunning technique to a barrage of bodies submerged in water during the night and creates her effects using the refraction of light. Through a fragile process of experimentation, she builds elaborate scenes of coalesced colors and entangled bodies that exalt the human character as one of vigor and warmth, while also capturing the beauty and vulnerability of the tragic experience that is the human condition. 

“My purpose behind the work is to question and find understanding in the craziness, tragedy, vulnerability, beauty and power of mankind,” says Rogers. “When a piece can help someone or when someone writes to me saying they were in tears of emotion viewing the work; that’s when I feel a sense of peace.”

Born in Kailua, Hawaii, Rogers’ obsession with water as a medium runs deep. Her marine surroundings inspired her, and her fascination with Earth’s most cherished element allows viewers of her work to dream of impossible beauty and hope. “What I want more than ever is to express and inspire hope and freedom, a sense of wonder and tranquility, to create a safe place to dream wildly, and most importantly to inspire the idea that there are still mysterious, impossibly beautiful things on Earth—not solely in our imaginations.”

As a medium, water can be dangerously unforgiving. “It seeps in the nostrils, it’s cold and has a life of its own,” says Rogers. “You move where it wants you to move, and the fabrics dance at their own pace.  For the models, being under water shuts off the excessive thought process that we all have going on in our heads, which is wonderful because it allows them to really be themselves completely.“

Rogers admits the unpredictable and varied results of her process are not really supposed to work, and that’s the beauty of it. “It’s like you’re pushing through these barriers and most of the photographs, they’re not usable. It’s that pushing through, that creates the hope and the beauty in the end.” The ‘pushing through’ is an extensive process. A collection of about 25 images will usually take Rogers from start to finish about a year to complete. “I think I do spend a lot of time on them, making sure that each one is perfect in the emotion they convey, in its title, colors, and cropping,’ says Rogers. “It seems that each year I become more of a perfectionist and the process becomes more intense.

And each year, Rogers’ work becomes more celebrated, viewed and collected. Her exhibitions are global, from Paris, London, Italy, Mexico City to Shanghai, Sao Paulo, South Africa, Los Angeles and more, and are held in private and public collections throughout the world. She made waves for her recent exhibition during the Shanghai Photo Fair, shown with Shanghai and Vancouver-based Art Labor Gallery. She is a two-time finalist for the Contemporary Talents Award from the Foundation François Schneider in France, and was commissioned by Apple to create underwater images with the iPhone 11Pro, as well as being featured in one of their behind-the-scenes process films. In 2019, she won Open Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Photography Awards. Today, high-profile Hollywood directors, Silicon Valley tech tycoons, and Chinese collectors—among fortunate others—are adding her works to their private collections.

A reoccurring motif in Rogers’ work is exploring the connection between water and space to show the beauty, freedom and, conversely, the struggle and complexity of being human. “The two vast expanses of water on earth and space are often juxtaposed in my work, both their order and chaos, and one’s feeling of being infinitesimal, yet feeling the wonder of being a part of the universe at large. These emotions caused the ancient Greeks and other past civilizations to look for answers in the majesty of the stars,” says Rogers. 

Rogers’ “Celestial Bodies” collection is inspired by this human condition and spirit: “I wanted to explore the idea of the two opposing yet complementary forces into which creative energy divides, and whose fusion brings the phenomenal world into being, with double images that I hoped would transport one in time and space into a classical yet futuristic world.”

Rogers’ latest collection, “Human” was shot prior to the Coronavirus outbreak and during the post-production process, Rogers wanted the collection to embody strength during the pandemic. One of the images, “Riders of the Light,” imagines three angels rising and looking down on humanity. In the context of the pandemic, Rogers said: “Sometimes we need the darkness to see the light.” She plans to donate the work to Mount Sinai Hospital Intensive Care Unit in New York City. Proceeds from another photo in the series, “Venus Rising,” have been donated to charity. 

“The message behind all of my work has been freedom, hope, and persisting through vulnerabilities,” she said. “So for me the work is always about humanity.”

ArtLaborGallery.com

Martin Kemble
Director, Art Labor Gallery
Shanghai & Vancouver
+1 778.957.8108
m@artlaborgallery.com