Oregon based artist Morgan Rosskopf describes herself as a “visual hunter-gatherer”. In other words, her surreal, carnal works are mostly driven by her own intuitions. Her illustrations on paper combine hand-drawn elements and collage to create lush clusters of personal imagery: a messy, knotted assemblage of fragments, from the sweet and savory to bodily and grotesque. “Hunting and gathering images is both subject and method,” she explains. “I believe that all my images already exist; I just have to find them and rearrange them.”
Using the juxtaposition in her images as a visual metaphor, Rosskopf explores ideas about anxiety, dissonance, vulnerability, and love. “My work is triangulated between my studio practice, my subconscious, and my experiences, interpreted and synthesized in the act of making. Inspired by methodologies of surrealist drawing, I engage with the work in an intuitive manner, responding to the wants and needs of the drawings as they get created,” she says.
“Because there is no objective referent of comparison for these emotions, we are left to describe them using metaphor, making this area of language very fluid and difficult to pin down. I am particularly interested in illustrating how we tell the story of our lives to ourselves and how we inadvertently live by the metaphors we create. Our internal monologues hold great power; they shape our reality and reshape our memories, consolidating experiences, thoughts, dreams, and emotions into a somehow unified psychology.” Rosskopf will next show her works on May 6th in her solo “Heavy Pop!” at One Grand Gallery in Oregon.