Christian Rogers’s Cruising Paradise

LOS ANGELES — A fantastical queer, ketamine-fueled backyard of Eden will be discovered at Noon Projects in LA’s historic Chinatown. Heaven on Earth, Christian Rogers’s solo present is a fluorescent floral feast for the eyes. Principally, SpongeBob Squarepants’s Bikini Backside, however homosexual. Georgia O’Keeffe, however on poppers. The sculpted multimedia work and drawings incorporate classic porn journal clippings collected from queer bookstores like LA’s iconic recently shuttered and resurrected Circus of Books. The work of Oregon-born, Los Angeles-based Christian Rogers explores queer pleasure and therapeutic, performing as a memorial for these misplaced to the AIDS epidemic. 

Excessive-gloss acrylic three-dimensional work of flowers and celestial our bodies dominate the gallery area. In “The Blue Rose” (2023) a paper pulp rose rises from the canvas like an enormous puffy sticker. Its psychedelic leafy arms are outstretched, dancing or flexing, celebrating the scantily clad males nestled between its tendrils. In “Full Grown / Full Blown” (2023), an erect neon orange flower with blue coral-like veins grows from the sting of a home made paper pulp body, which resembles one you would possibly discover encircling a funhouse mirror. The suggestive veiny flower is surrounded by different engorged flowers with tight facilities and paper cut-outs of aroused posing males and one muscular leather-based daddy. The feel of the paper evokes hills, muscle tissues, our bodies, and the tops of circus tents. Rogers’s work are a carnival of homosexual love and euphoria, a cruising paradise. 

Extra pornographic collages and muted cosmic black and white graphite drawings of flowers and starfish provide a reprieve from the neon and showcase extra of Rogers’s technical expertise. The backroom wall is lined with earth-toned precarious polaroids of day-blooming cactus flowers overlayed with unabashedly nude our bodies. Bisexual cactus blooms that require mechanical (hand) pollination sprout from torsos and groins, reminding the viewer that artwork itself is a type of hand pollination, a possibility to retell historical past or to create one thing new. 

Although joyful in its preliminary look, Heaven on Earth is infused with emotional wrestle — particularly the LGBTQ+ neighborhood’s decades-long struggle for political rights and sexual freedom. It’s assumed that a few of the males from these classic journal clippings didn’t survive the HIV/AIDS disaster. Rogers’s work act as a tribute to those that have been misplaced and likewise as a utopian reimagining of what can nonetheless be. In “Orgy on the Oasis” (2023) a pair of eyes from {a magazine} clipping glares on the viewer as if to say, always remember me. 

With hate crimes towards the LGBTQ+ neighborhood on the rise, just like the recent Lake Arrowhead fatal shooting of a queer ally store proprietor for displaying a pleasure flag in her window, it’s extra vital now than ever to create space for queer artwork in supportive environments like Midday Initiatives, which prioritizes queer artists and doesn’t draw back from work that’s overtly homoerotic. Rogers’s work is not only a smut archive or a homosexual psychedelic dreamland, however slightly a reimagining of a potential future whereby there are extra medical advances in HIV prevention and a brand new technology is raring to overtly discover their queerness.

Heaven on Earth continues at Midday Initiatives (951 Chung King Highway, Chinatown, Los Angeles) by October 21. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.