Jessica Rohrer at Arena - New York … an autobiographical strain permeates the artist's work

For her first New York solo show, Jessica Rohrer embarked on an autobiographical tour of her personal geography, going back to visit many of the places she called home over her 29 years. Working from both photographs and memory, she undertook to paint every house or apartment she has ever lived in.

Her small-scale, oil-on-panel works are straightforward renderings, yet the depicted buildings have an idealized quality, as if spruced up by memory. The images range from sweet Victorian-style houses to stark contemporary high-rises to architectural details--such as brick walls with rectangular windows-that are wholly realistic yet approach geometric abstraction. Rohrer's brushwork is delicate, each brick sharply defined, the leaves on trees flawlessly rendered, window reflections--sometimes a painting within the painting--given an equally discerning treatment.

We can glean bits of information about Rohrer's life from these paintings as well as from the show's title, "From Kewaskum to Brooklyn." Born in the Midwest, she has lived in a series of relatively comfortable dwellings, from single-family homes in Wisconsin to apartment complexes in Chicago and New York. Her dorm in Evanston, III. (we can assume she attended Northwestern University), fills the canvas with a minimalistic grid of brick and glass. She lived in a cute pink house in New Haven while attending graduate school at Yale. It appears in its entirety in one canvas and again in two window details. She now resides in a beige brick apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

As a group, the paintings serve as a study in middle-American domestic architecture. Individually, they become more intimate and conjure a host of associations related to home and the past. They're nostalgic without sentimentalism. They're about the artist, but not entirely personal. The works are both a record of her past and anecdotal evidence of an itinerant society where it's increasingly rare for people to have grown up in one house, where years and life events are associated with various places. While Rohrer's houses won't have the same emotional tug on viewers that they must on the artist, they kindle recollections of a related sort. When I was a kid, my family once used a realtor with artistic ambitions who would paint watercolors of houses she sold and give them to the new owners. Rohrer's show makes me wish I still had that rendering of 1847 Boulinwood Lane, but that watercolor is probably long since buried in a junk drawer--lost, like so many memories.

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