BUNNY ROGERS
Read at KGB on 2 Feb 2022

Mandy steps slowly and deliberately into the cold room, one mismatched shoe after the other, and settles in at the grand piano. She pours herself a glass of wine. She’s not dressed for the weather — it’s snowing this morning, flakes falling gently from the ceiling to form an ice-blue carpet on the floor, and she’s only wearing a pink bralette and an eggshell-and-mauve miniskirt. But her mind is elsewhere. The room is totally silent. She takes a sip of the wine, which she’d spilled a little of, forming a dark purple stain on the snow, like blood. She rests her hands on her knees, slouches, and sighs. Then she brings her hands to the black piano and begins to play. It’s Elliott Smith’s “See You in Heaven.” Her rendition is faithful, full of feeling, the melody transmitting an ineffable blend of brightness and dimness, like the white winter sun’s reflection on the snow in the room. After she finishes, her hands immediately drop to her knees, her shoulders droop, she stares at the ground. Her movements in this moment are significantly more labored than her music, which is graceful, practiced. The silence feels long and heavy. She pours herself more wine, sips it, begins the next song. Mandy is a cartoon — a clone of Mandy Moore — and the room is the Columbine High School cafeteria. 

This is the opening of a video piece that was projected onto the wall of Societe gallery in Berlin, in a room that featured a piano, falling snow that blanketed the ground, and tealights encased in green apples carved with faces like jack’o’lanterns. It was part of the second installment of Bunny Rogers’ trilogy of exhibits devoted to the Columbine High School massacre of April 20, 1999, called “Columbine Cafeteria.” The first had been called “Columbine Library.” She describes the difference between them: “I think of the library as being slow and dark, filled with obstacles. That’s also how it looks in police photos. The cafeteria was open and well-lit, with tons of people and bombs hidden in duffel bags in plain sight. The cafeteria was more confusing. There’s not the same closure as in the library, where Dylan and Eric committed suicide.” 

I first encountered Bunny’s work in 2014 at a small-press library in Brooklyn called Mellow Pages. I had gone to read a poetry book by this guy in Queens I had a crush on, but it didn’t end up resonating with me. I found myself gravitating toward a beautiful lavender hardcover engraved with awareness ribbons and the title Cunny Poem — a complete archive of Bunny’s poetry from 2012 to 2014. The work, to me, felt alternately like abrupt and violent dispatches from the feminine id, and the lamentations of the strange and estranged artist. The poems were short, the pages filled with open space, creating an ambiance of distance, silence, through which the anguished transmissions feel more poignant. “Entertainment depends on violence / And my pain is at the heart of your violence,” she writes.  

Much of Bunny’s art engages with themes of loss, mourning, childhood, distance, death, and violence — hurting and being hurt, holding onto the precious while watching it pass away, then continuing to hold. She has found a kindred spirit in Elliott Smith, to whom she often pays homage in her work. This influence is at play in the 2011 exhibit Sister Unn’s, in which she and frequent collaborator Filip Olszewski rented a storefront in Forest Hills and turned it into a locked, abandoned flower shop named Sister Unn’s, featuring shelves of dying roses and one lavender rose, encased in ice, lit up in a freezer in the back. Bunny says it was only after she’d created the piece that she remembered the Elliott Smith lyric “True love is a rose / Behind glass / That’s locked and kept closed.” That verse reminds me of her later collaboration with Filip, If I Die Young, a 2013 exhibit in which televisions played a chorus of children singing a country song by The Band Perry that begins, “If I die young, bury me in satin / Lay me down on a bed of roses / Sink me in the river at dawn / Send me away with the words of a love song.” The voices had come from YouTube videos uploaded by either the children or their parents, featuring kids as young as four. 

I’m not sure how to end this except to say that Bunny is one of my favorite artists, and is someone making work that processes, on a very elemental level, the themes of our time as the school-shooting generation. She launched her poetry book My Apologies Accepted here at KGB in 2015 and it’s a real honor to welcome her back. Please welcome Bunny Rogers.