M E N Gallery proudly presents Endless Shrimp, an exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist David Rogers. In his first solo exhibition with M E N, Rogers offers new works in his ongoing painting series concerning American commerce, consumption, and the appeasement of our collective national vices.
Including imagery of processed foods, security camera footage, and text, the works in Endless Shrimp focus on the desperation and latent violence inherent within many forms of American convenience and exchange. Commodities and profits made on the backs of cheap, overseas labor, retail outlets and eateries staffed by underpaid and overworked part-time employees, and an ever rising economic disparity within the American populace, are subjects that form the core inspirations at the heart of this work.
Taking its name from the weekly dinner special of a ubiquitous chain of seafood restaurants, Endless Shrimp includes new works wherein painted, mass-produced food stuffs commingle with abstract representations of commercial freight and shipping backdrops as well as Xerox image transfers of fast food and convenience store robberies. These latter images suggest a logical apex of financial disproportion, desire, power (or lack thereof) and desperation. Gathering source material equally from childhood memories, perambulations through industrialized Brooklyn, web searches, and journeys across the suburban American West, David Rogers examines the making of the “American Experience” from the vantage point of critical observer and participant, foregrounding the absurdity, contradiction, irony, and brutality embedded within so many aspects of American consumer culture.
