Bunny Rogers Interview: Mourning Youth

Bunny Rogers (b. 1990) talks about creating autobiographical work that draws from memory and deals with her childhood by archiving her feelings from that time: “You can’t make objective art, it’s going to be subjective.” “I feel like I’ve revealed something private when I’m the most specific about my feelings. So rather than trying to talk about something broad in a broad way, you can talk about something broad in a hyper-specific way.” From an early age, Rogers made digital artwork specifically for the Internet and liked playing the virtual pets games ‘Neopets’. Her current website (meryn.ru) resembles a personal homepage from the late 1990s or early 2000s: “It kind of represents the website I wish I could have made when I was younger.” Because it was still the early days of the internet, Rogers had a feeling that she was doing something that she shouldn’t be doing, and that she was escaping into a different world: “But now the different world doesn’t offer the escape that it once did.” Popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are still connected to you: “It could potentially be more artificial than characters I was trying to fill out when I was a child.” Rogers’ artwork deals with memory and refers to the teenage culture she grew up with. Bunny Rogers graduated from Parsons, New York in 2012 and is a MFA graduate from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden (2017). Rogers has held exhibitions at several prominent venues, including Société in Berlin, Queens Museum and Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York.