MCLA Gallery 51

I am too, a piece of clay

LaRissa Rogers

 

On View | July 18 - September 28, 2025

Opening Reception | Friday, July 18, 5-7pm | 51 Main St., North Adams

Artist Talk | Saturday, July 19, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm | 49 Main St., North Adams
LaRissa Rogers in conversation with exhibition curators Audrey Lopez and Eunice Uhm

Reimagining the state of indeterminacy as a layered space that engenders the potential for growth and renewal, LaRissa Rogers’ I am too, a Piece of Clay explores undefined marginality as an aesthetic form that generates alternative epistemologies - sensorial, spatial, and affective. Rogers calls attention to the intervals that are often unremarked and overlooked: the negative space between motifs in a pattern, the threshold of the porch that is neither inside nor outside, or the quiet residue of spoken words that linger in the air. For the artist, these in-between spaces articulate a grammar of relationality - an embodied syntax through which we come into connection with one another and the environments that hold us. Rogers materializes these thematic concerns by transforming the gallery into a front porch - an architectural construct historically tied to practices of communal intimacy and shaped by the design innovations of enslaved Black people in the nineteenth century. Accompanying the spatial intervention, the artist brings together a selection of video, sculptural, and wall-based works that collectively invite a mode of attentive, embodied engagement. 
 
The exhibition title I am too, a Piece of Clay draws on the biblical encounter between Job - a man tested for his faith - and Elihu, a younger figure who challenges both Job and his friends. Elihu references the creation story in Genesis, reminding us that all humans are formed from clay, shaped by the hands of God who breathed life into us. The title, along with its invocation of the creation story, underscores Rogers’ ongoing material investigation into the ways in which the environment – both natural and social – shapes the formation of cultural identity. Elaborating on Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identities as “the unstable points of identification or suture […] within the discourse of history and culture,” Rogers considers the environment as a dynamic force that un/settles social relations and calibrates cultural negotiations. Thinking with and through the natural and social environments that reverberate through us, she poses pressing, timely questions: how might the environment animate alternatives ways of knowing and relating to the world? In what ways does space mediate new forms of sociality? And how does the land/scape hold us, and how do we hold it in return? In this exhibition, Rogers invites viewers into a space of indeterminacy, to dwell in the undefined margins, and to listen carefully to the quiet frequencies of possibility that resonate within the in-between.