Rose Briccetti

36" x 96"
Acrylic on canvases

Daucus carota, or wild carrot, has been used as an anti-fertility drug since antiquity. This piece weaves the history and iconography of this plant into a three panel painting in orange. It evolves like a traditional triptych, from left to right, with an Edenic scene (a fall forest), a canvas of earthly pleasures (a McMansion kitchen), and finally a hellscape (agent orange devastated Vietnam).

Acrylic on canvases
36” x 96”

Full title: Bougainvillea and Reverse Drag Triptych : Jeanne Baret in an Edenic California Sunset, a McMansion, and a Wildfire

Acrylic on birch panels with interpretive panel mounted to foamcore

36” x 120”

Peasant herb woman Jeanne Baret has recently been credited as the first westerner to discover the bougainvillea, an anti-fertility plant, invasive species, and icon of the Southern California landscape. Baret disguised herself as a man in order to join her lover on a French naval voyage around the globe, sent for scientific, economic, and colonial purposes. The painting, with traditional Eden, earthly/material pleasures, and hell panels, explores Baret’s strange story by combining and remixing an eclectic collection of contemporary and traditional iconography.

Full title: Bat Bomb Triptych (or The Military Industrial Complex Casting Gold Idols to Unclean Birds and the Shadows of the Cave), 2020-2021
Acrylic on birch panels with artist’s frames
52” x 108”

Shown in 2021 at LeiMin Space in Los Angeles. Installation image at bottom.

The imagery in the work originates from the story of the Bat Bomb, a failed U.S. Military project which aimed to strap incendiary napalm devices to Mexican Free-tailed Bats during World War II. Bat iconography along with imagery from the fields biology and history intermingle with word associations, puns, and pop culture to densely populate the three diorama-like panels. The panels evolve traditionally from left to right, beginning in an Edenic setting featuring a desert sunset in the Mexican Free-tailed bat's habitat, traveling then to a zone of earthly pleasures located in Batman's Batcave, and ending in a dark and cavernous hellscape. Unclear whether they have been hoarded or collected, the materials around the painting are at once museological and conspiratorial, toeing the line between taxonomic and insane. Meanwhile, the constellation of images that appear in the work travel along their own convoluted trajectory of conscious associations and tongue-in-cheek references, reflecting the artist’s fascination with cyberculture. Artworks, magazine pics, thrifted bric-a-brac, bat toys, googly eyes, sketches, stickers, rhinestones, ribbons, tacks, silk plants, and false eyelashes are gathered, collaged, reorganized, and showcased in a maximalistic installation that explodes with the artist's parallel practices of research and painting, projecting their fruits out into the physical space of the gallery.

Small paintings made as studies in 2021 during research for this larger bat triptych: https://www.rosebriccetti.com/#/bat-bomb-triptych-2021/

Full title: Sweet Grenadine: Six Punica granatum Seeds in a Desert Storm, Shirley Temple, and Geopolitics

Acrylic on birch panels with custom wall graphic

36" x 120"

The pomegranate, whose abortive properties were recently rediscovered after being known to the ancients, serves as a jumping off point for this work to explore the patriarchal hegemony of religion, war, cultural history, capitalism, and sex.

High Resolution wall graphic here.

Silk flowers, false eyelashes, rhinestones, acrylic and spray paint, toy animals, collage, preserved butterflies, googly eyes, African clawed frog in ethanol and jar, glass cases, tampon, seashells, colored LED lights, Spanish moss, sequins, corals, sculptures and mixed media on custom wood and acrylic lightbox pedestal

54" x 36" x 36"

"Nature morte,” French for "still life,” directly translates as "dead nature." This unruly amalgam of real and faux lifeforms explores female sexuality with details like clams, an African clawed frog (an early pregnancy test), and copulating turtles.

A history-painting-internet-meme rendered in watercolor with a cheesy brochure, this work explores sex, privilege, and ethnography by remixing pop culture imagery. The work questions the authority of the images and historical information in a post-truth world and blurs the lines of low and high art.

Archival pigment print on stretched canvas

48” x 60”

This fictional plant is composed of carefully isolated details of the foreign species depicted in Banks' Florilegium that now colonize Southern California. The invented plant reaches up and out from its roots, with tentacle-like arms and bursting leaves, spreading in new directions. This botanic sprawl, reaching into new lands, is both a by-product of, and metaphor for, the activity of human exploration whose efforts have spread, recombined, and altered lands and cultures across the globe.

Oil Slick collects and juxtaposes images of consumer goods—often petroleum based—with the popular iridescent finish known as “oil slick.” Though visually beautiful, the oil slick finish refers to pollution and environmental disaster. The images together create a work that explores themes of consumerism, our continued addiction to oil, and beauty in tragedy.

Mixed media sculptures and installation

72” x 120” x 24”

Merging the ethos of the wunderkammer, the reverence of an altar, and the feminine space of the boudoir this display is composed of natural objects, detailed sculptures, found images from the internet, magazines, and memes to create a cacophonous yet cohesive display. It is carefully arranged and categorized according to a taxonomy which is inherently anti-hierarchical and centered around a feminine sensibility.

Watercolor and acrylic on panel with custom Xeroxed flyer

36" x 60"

"Artemisia absinthium (Wormwood) with Frogs" references the form of an altarpiece to examine wormwood and frogs as antifertility icons, hallucinatory substances, and elements of the book of revelation. Collaged iconography from a vast array of sources and an accompanying conspiratorial flyer, both ominous and funny, allow this piece to recombine and de-hierarchize the strange historical, cultural, biological, and ethnobotanical stories surrounding this plant and animal.

Painting text reads: "Then I saw three impure spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet. Rev 16:13"

Archival pigment print of digital collage

2" x 8"

Part of the West Reading Museum of Temporary Art public art project curated by BESTTEST, this piece was created as a site-specific mini-mural responding to a West Reading resident's story about their unusual pets.

Watercolor on Arches paper

Created at the 2018 DNA Gallery Residency, these paintings explore the history of the ecological disaster at Times Beach, a Superfund-site-turned-park near my hometown of Eureka, MO.

Archival pigment print on canvas in artist’s frame with custom plaque

18” x 24”

The highly hormonally sensitive clawed frog was used as a pregnancy test until the 1960s, at which point many labs released the animals into the wild. In recent years, biologists have discovered that the species is a carrier of the deadly chytrid fungus, and their release into new ecosystems has destroyed amphibian populations around the globe. By combining dead frogs with with feminine icons and home remedies for yeast infections (caused by the candida fungus), this piece uses humor and punning to examine fertility, femininity, fungal diseases, and turn the trope of the vanitas still life on its head.

Plaque on frame reads: NATURE MORTE AU CHYTRID & CANDIDA

Vanitas Collages Made from the Aspirational Lifestyle Magazines of the Girl Who Used to Live at my Crummy Apartment, 2018

Mixed media collages

12” x 12” or 8” x 10” each

Found chair with googly eyes and digitally printed wallpaper with crown molding

Dimensions variable

Frog Egg Surveillance Chair plays with the visual pun that exists between frog eggs and googly eyes. Xenopus Lifecycle Damask in Arsenic Green is a custom designed and digitally printed wallpaper decorated with the lifecycle of the African clawed frog (an animal widely used in scientific testing and initially used to test for human pregnancy) and tadpole-like sperm, this piece creates a tension between traditional and contemporary views of domesticity and sexual reproduction. The cool green color palette is a nod to the toxic arsenic-based pigment Scheele's Green, popular in Victorian wallpaper, textiles, and cosmetics, and this toxicity is echoed in by the subtle limb mutations present in the frogs.