To stand in front of an Alyse Rosner painting is akin to reading a map with no legend where the scale multiplies from inches to feet, feet to yards, yards to miles and so forth until you realize it is infinite space you are pondering. Any point can be taken to enter the work and after logging the distance, to exit seems a life decision. Over the last ten years Rosner has dissected and sliced every vector in her work without breaking the path through the map’s terrain. From the petite but potent acrylic on pine blocks measuring but six by five inches to the magnificent embrace of her recent seventeen-foot murals with their mountaintop views set before us, Rosner maintains the same disciplined work credo: let no space go unconsidered. Throughout her practice there are indications of a journey and she is the guide. Earlier, when the scale of the pine planks proved too limiting, she switched to painting on Yupo, a synthetic material cut from rolls, with a tooth to its surface textured just enough to create graphite rubbings, not unlike tourists who make rubbings of Revolutionary War tombstones as souvenirs. Only Rosner made rubbings of the wood grain of the deck outside her studio, echoing the patterns she found in the pine, in effect self-portraiture, placing her studio into the painting by reference. As in the wild, nature has consistently found its way into Rosner’s art whenever there is an opening. The exhibition’s titular painting is itself a reference to the natural world’s power to guide her direction. Her most ambitious and individual work to date, Bracing Against the Wind (2022) is a counterfoil to 2021’s Trusting the River. Where the former sought to make peace with a personal history in turbulent times through safely negotiating the flow of life (the River), here she faces the uncertainty that has come to define our current era head on, propping herself up against the bulwark of her thirty years of making art to defend against the coming storm. The paintings in Trusting the River were executed during the depths of the pandemic while Rosner was able to take advantage of a residency in a shopping mall that in normal times would have been buzzing with curious crowds. She had six months. In the following year and a half, things have changed. She states, I think these paintings are an extension of what was on my mind with the last series – life experience combined with the physical act of painting - but a more private extended experience….16 months of working on them, vs. the more compressed residency…carrying canvases from the backyard into the studio, spraying them with the hose in the basement of my house, washing out color in the grass, adding it back on the walls making something you hold in your hands. Very related to the miniatures.

The title of the second mural exhibited, Carrying Its Broken Shells, (2023) is taken from Ae Hee Lee’s poem Green Card: Evidence of Adequate Means of Financial Support (POETRY, January 2023 issue). It also hints at the influence Samantha Hunt’s The Seas had on Rosner. In the fantastical novel, the protagonist/narrator believes herself to be a mermaid (and may very well be one). Hunt uses color for vivid characterization (the blue of the ocean, e.g.) much in the same way Rosner uses color as expression regardless of form. Carrying Its Broken Shells with its aqua and sea green ground emerging from extensive graphite rubbings is a center-weighted composition, a feature in many of the works executed in the past two years. With its flowing lines and swimming forms – curvy herringbone or chevrons turned on their sides - Carrying Its Broken Shells is seemingly painted beneath the waves. A break in the middle however offers what appears to be a bird’s eye view of the ocean surface as Rosner toys with her own flavor of magic realism and multiple viewpoints.

Zephyr (blue) (2022), a 60 x 54 inch canvas, makes use of her dexterous handling of tools from poured pigment and washed canvas to an abundance of brush strokes from hand-sized to miniscule. Here the central form of the painting further indicates a break from the recent past. Overall, the painting could be a Nick Cave Soundsuit or an ornithologist’s dream.

Oracle, 2022 greets visitors into the gallery. The layering of swirls – the feminized herringbone pattern Rosner repeats often – in shades of lavender, yellow, gray, and blue define a portal, a vulvic fold opening. Rosner, forever exploring the metaphorical possibilities of self-referential elements as artist and creator, has birthed a work that defines the very act of creating it, giving rise to another eternal, infinite loop within itself, the very space she is always describing.