Today we’d like to introduce you to Rose Briccetti.
Hi Rose, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in Eureka, Missouri and always loved painting, even as a child. I bounced around a little in college but ended up getting my BFA in painting at Washington University in St. Louis. After a few years in New York freezing and broke while working in galleries, I moved out to Southern California. I spent my first five years on the west coast designing natural history museum exhibits and falling in love with the field. I eventually made my way back to school and finished my MFA in 2017. Since then, I have been making work that investigates the natural world, museology, and internet culture and teaching at colleges across Southern CA.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
My path has been circuitous and bumpy. After college, I struggled with health issues, worked a lot, and stopped making art for a while. But the creative impulse always found a way to squeak out, and I began making complicated Halloween costumes, Photoshop collages based on inside jokes, and weird installations as my apartment decor. Eventually all these strange and “unserious” ways of making found their way into my artistic practice. Finding the time and space to be an artist is always challenging, and working multiple teaching jobs, finding studio space, and sorting out health insurance are continued struggles! I feel incredibly lucky to be able to support myself and make work and am always trying to remember how much I love what I do, despite the instability.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My work takes many forms, but I would probably call myself a painter. I make extremely dense and complex history paintings that begin as digital collages of imagery I collect around a weird true story where nature and culture collide. I like to combine iconography from art history, pop culture, scientific publications, and high and low culture into each work. I use humor and vivid visuals to reorganize this visual information into eccentric and invented taxonomies. Much of my research happens online and I think of my paintings as visual worlds that–like Wikipedia hyperlinks–cross vast swaths of time and space and create new connections.
The paintings become part of installations, with weird and humorous wall texts, sculptures, found objects, collages, and more. I will be opening a solo show at LeiMin Space in Chinatown in late June, so the work can be seen IRL for the first time in a while very soon!
How do you think about luck?
I think luck is perhaps the single biggest factor in shaping my life and work. I’ve had bouts of bad luck–terrible jobs, breakups, health problems–that have always pushed me in new directions and forced me to think about things differently. And though I’m certainly a workaholic, good luck has also played a huge role every step of the way. When I first moved to California, I was newly single and broke and didn’t know a soul, but happened to find an interesting museum job that required both graphic design and woodshop fabrication experience. I had that odd combination of skills from art school and my museum work shaped my path forward and creative practice and introduced me to a wonderful group of friends. A few years later, in that same position, things in my department got really difficult. At the time, it was incredibly stressful, but being in a difficult position professionally pushed me to reevalutate and go back to art school. Had the job run smoothly, I might still be working a 9-5 today and given up on being an artist. At the risk of being deeply corny, I try to think about my career like a card game: I can control how well I know the game and put in the practice and work, but ultimately I get dealt some random cards and have to find a way through.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@rosebriccetti
- Website: www.rosebriccetti.com
- Instagram: @rosebriccetti
Image Credits:
Chris Velasco, Jonathan Berger
