Jenna Louise Rogan: Beauty in Dissonance
There is an intensity that builds in a restaurant as the clock plunges closer to 6 or 7. An excavation of the space for meaning would be an exploration into the many facets of how it runs, who runs it, and for whom. I picture it like building a narrative: Who is it about, how do they feel and who gets to read about them. A waitress walks through the same channels of space to get to the bar to take a drink to a regular. To a man who was in before. They talked absently about small things- conversations sweet but fleeting, and in those talks, the regular, here only on business, finds out about a small inconsistency in her character.
She’s looking for something to help her break the cycle we all feel being steeped in inside the restaurant life: go to work around 4, get off when it's too late to do anything meaningful for yourself, go to sleep too late, wake up, and go to work around 4. Broken only by time off which can be spent as a desire to simply deliver yourself from, well, yourself.
He comes in the next day. In their conversation the day before he remembers her mentioning a desire to paint. To create art. But that it is so difficult to know how to start. He gives her a notepad with pencils and says, now you don’t have any excuse.
Jenna Louise Rogan began painting three years ago, taking the advice of this outstanding individual to create despite the excuses. So, she did:
“I practiced every day for an hour maybe two.”
She taught herself to sketch hands and to hone the themes of paintings to come.
“It was the creative outlet I needed to break that cycle. I needed it for many reasons.”
These day to day sessions filled with filling pages of rehearsed images, or plots on how to explore tension in the lines of someone’s hand or that of a paintbrush coated in lucid paint.
When we build a narrative, we discuss an arc of the character. We start at the beginning.
“My family were all artists. My uncle, incredible. I think that is why I never truly dived into it.”
With one class on drawing hands in 6th grade as her only “professional” training, Jenna points to this influence from her family and the inherent pressures of being an artist like them as a driving force for her art.
“Who are we outside of the conditioning of social structures?”
Then, the narrative blossoms to caress the conflict that becomes the precipice of the character’s creation. Because the creation, Jenna’s painting, depends on this discovery of self “without social structures” There is a mimetic relationship between her self-taught skill and the defiance found in her art. A hard-won hour to hour, inch by inch training of tendons and lighting to find a slight curvature or entirely new way to shade a surrounding image. Each moment carefully examining how to act within creation: does the action of art come during that moment of creation? Or is it a rhizomatic intimacy with all the things which surround it? The days of trying, of failing, of not trying, of getting better, or just not doing it at all. This everyday engagement with the mundane takes a sort of focus which can push you to a discovery of what means the most.
“You can achieve anything you want if you put the work into it/I found I was mostly interested in vulnerability and that relation to ourselves.”
And when pursued with these questions of what major themes make her art, she posits the edge of her craft with a sharp and simple answer: “Beauty in dissonance.”
Delicate, dancing brushstrokes break open the shadows of a women in a tank top rifled to the front of a purple spattered surrounding. A gas mask holds her head up with her shadow toned arms framing the word ”Barbie” in black filled neon pink letters.
Poised with the tension of an all-consuming aspiration of feeling manipulated and defeated, a nude figure arches backward in the soft-molding of smoke behind her. Two hands marionette strings from above: positioning the nude female figure at their control. We feel trenches of our power-driven from our hearts by the constant thrumming of trauma held in that balance. Notable, a string slips around the woman’s throat as her red-hair pours in an unmistakably sanguine manner drawing the eye of the viewer to her blindfold and the complicated weight a body would feel to hold with such ease.
I could revel in a discussion of all her pieces in this way, but I was struck to position this piece as a narrative because of the positional weight of one:
First: red . Manic, and marvelous she stares in a inexorable gleam of an expensive opioid second only the wreath of pearls grasping to her neck. Hoops the size of a Kardashian shopping spree stand dented but stable next to her red, red again, lips gnawing at her glass of red wine as if it was the only blood of Christ given to anyone. All of this chaotic, yet almost comfortable profile is contained with what I want to deem the American Dream Suit: Thick, concussion caused bandages woven on her head; ambitious, like how 2016 in November was ambitious. Red, White and Blue glasses containing the bludgeoned windows to what would be a soul if it wasn’t sold for such perfect teeth. The shadow work is remarkable: notice the curve of her collar bones shaved to points by the use of a cleaved darkness next to her wrist holding the glass of wine.
In less than 3 years Jenna Rogan’s art has been featured in several festivals. She, being forged by the attrition laden art of self-teaching, does commissions of anyone and practices her own pieces on skate decks which to me, is the ultimate sacrifice of a writer’s love for her work: to put something so vulnerable on something so destined to be destroyed through an action of self-meditation and love. She sells t-shirts, hoodies, and tank tops on her website www.jennalouise.art, and updates her booming Instagram page, @artofjennalouise, often.
These are the pieces of a narrative. Of artist Jenna Rogan and her reformation-al act of taking home the sketch book and turning it into vulnerable, self-coping creations.
“I needed art. I needed something to keep me from a relapse.”
Jenna hopes that her art can be that proverbial “sketch-book-given” for those who need art in a similar way. She hopes that her boldly contrasted pieces echo inside the boxes we were all stuck in with labels and structures. That her journey towards a redemption narrative can position you to create, to question, and to always reach out to the person in need.
