Stuart Shave Modern Art is pleased to present American artist and performer Clare E. Rojas in her second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Large-scale painted panels quilt the gallery walls of San Francisco-based Rojas’ latest installation. Gouache tableaux’s depicting women as the protector of a natural world enlist the painted and patch-worked formal qualities of American folk art.

Rojas’ imagery offers an alternative vision, where silent characters are painted into delicately wrought imaginary scenes. Women and their activities are central in Rojas’ whimsical spaces, which are designed as a humorous and empowering counterpoint to our daily interaction with unsympathetic and exploitative media images. Rojas strongly believes in the powerful healing properties of the natural world and works with what she sees as the purity and truthfulness behind simplified form. Nature is Rojas’ sanctuary and she believes that in its care the world can regain its beauty and strength.

Rojas’ installations are emotional landscapes that explore the social and physical worlds in which we live. By assuming the persona of singer & guitarist ‘Peggy Honeywell’, Rojas becomes a singular, consistent character, who pulls together each of the painted stories. Beneath the depth of Honeywell’s voice is an almost serene feeling of loss that deftly draws out the tales held within Rojas’ painted installations. Honeywell breathes a life into Rojas’ folkloristic spaces, narrating and elaborating on the rich imagery that covers the gallery walls.

Clare E. Rojas has had several solo exhibitions in the last four years including The Rose

Art Museum, Boston, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Deitch Projects, New York and

The Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee. Sympathetic Magic has shown previously at Museo De Arte Comtemporaneo De Castilla y Leon, Spain and will travel to Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands later this year. Under the name of Peggy Honeywell, Rojas is an established recording artist in her own right and has released five albums of original works.