Rosabel Rosalind: Literally So Hot

Literally So Hot

Literally So Hot consists of 20 works that collectively illustrate a vivid and melodramatic apocalyptic landscape. This world is informed by biblical mythology, conspiracy theory, pulp illustration, the climate crisis, and the artist’s identity as a born and bred San Fernando Valley girl.

Featuring Jewish Space Lasers, mile-long traffic jams, the biblical miracle of manna, ant infestations, and exactly 33 frogs, Literally So Hot imagines the artist’s own sublime dystopia. The panorama situates environmental threat in the same reality as theological salvation narratives, extremist conspiracy theories, and contemporary disaster movies; all of which utilize sensationalism to convey an otherworldly intervention. Contending with both the rise of mainstream conspiracy and an impending sixth extinction, this visual story presents an alternative world in which both real news and fake news coexist in an absurd universe beyond the earthly realm, yet seemingly in a not so distant future.

About Rosabel Rosalind

Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, Rosalind received her BFA in printmaking, painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Sullivan Gallery in Chicago. In 2018, Rosalind received a Fulbright Austria Research Grant to work with the Jewish Museum Vienna’s Schlaff Collection of anti-Semitic objects and postcards. As a result of this research, she exhibited in solo exhibitions at Vienna’s Museums Quartier and Improper Walls Gallery. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.

Using drawing, painting, installation and comics, Rosalind’s work allegorizes a sublime universe unraveled by the theatrics of theology, biology and autobiography. Informed by Jewish diasporic storytelling traditions, contemporary conspiracy theories and personal and cultural memory, her images animate the inanimate with uncanny sarcasm and critical cynicism. Humor serves a survivalist role in her work; through melodrama, irreverence and subliminal messaging Rosalind dismantles patriarchal, anthropocentric and white-supremacist hierarchies of power.
While Rosalind draws a lot of formal and symbolic inspiration from the art-historical canon, political caricature and early comic and pulp illustration, much of her process involves archiving personal memory from her coming-of-age in the San Fernando Valley. Working across a variety of media, she synthesize a series of mythologies and builds a catalog of uncanny symbolism, collapsing the past present and future into a sublime fiction that reflects her identity as a valley girl, a Funny Girl*, and a nice Jewish girl.

*(a life-long Streisand fan)