Rose Briccetti

Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana (Musa acuminata) is the debut exhibition by Rose Briccetti at Track 16 in East Hollywood. In this new body of work, the banana becomes the protagonist of a series of leafy, Palm-Beach-coded, deceptively playful yet deeply researched paintings that combine historical, artistic, and scientific research with art making to re-present natural and cultural histories.

Briccetti’s surrealist approach weaves together strange truths, biology, museology, cultural mythology, internet culture, art history, and personal experience through humor and vivid visual imagery. Familiar, ubiquitous, and seemingly innocuous, the banana becomes something more complicated: an icon of humor and deliciousness, a phallic symbol, and a potent reminder of the history of U.S. intervention and economic brutality in Latin America.

Bred primarily for shelf stability and commercial consistency, the dominant Cavendish banana has come to dominate the global banana trade at the expense of genetic diversity and ecological resilience. 99% of the bananas imported globally are Cavendish cultivars, genetically near-identical clones derived from a single plant lineage. Today’s grocery-store banana is highly susceptible to disease and remains under constant threat from pathogens capable of wiping out entire varietals. Its cultivation has also been associated with intensive pesticide use and agricultural practices that have had significant environmental and social consequences.

Within this saga, the banana’s history lays bare the dangers of both cultural and ecological monoculture. Beneath its tough exterior, the banana contains multitudes; its bright yellow flesh almost seems to warn us to proceed with caution.

Briccetti began developing this exhibition with a digital collage, which is presented as a pored-over large-scale triptych painting as well as a smaller print edition of the digital collage. Part of a larger series, the banana triptych is the latest work centering a species whose natural history intertwines with human culture in ways that are stranger than fiction. From these narrative history paintings, a cautionary tale about human folly emerges. Imagery associated with the end of the world becomes a metaphor for ecological collapse, replacing traditional religious judgment with the consequences of environmental disaster. Briccetti moves between digital and analog methodologies, considering how emerging universals in contemporary image making, like layering and transparency, are rooted in hundreds of years of painting’s history.

Like building a diorama, Briccetti’s process of collecting, researching, and arranging imagery within a painting becomes the first step in a larger act of world-building. Through the banana, she constructs a visual ecosystem where science, history, commerce, mythology, humor, and catastrophe coexist.

Rose Briccetti (b. 1985, Syracuse, NY) received her BFA from the Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Recent exhibitions include Freight + Volume (New York, NY), The Harn Museum (Gainesville, FL), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum (Santa Barbara, CA), Glass Rice (San Francisco, CA), the Dickinson Museum Center (Dickinson, ND), the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Special Collections Library (Santa Barbara, CA), PØST (Los Angeles, CA), and Left Field (San Luis Obispo, CA). Briccetti lives and works in North Florida.