People

Rosabel’s visual language has been informed by her extensive Garbage Pail Kids collection, soap opera sets, hitler’s mustache, anti-infestations, her lazy eye, being a little gay, synchronized swimming, traffic on the 405, sunburns, heartburn, stained glass windows, her rollerskating Bat Mitzvah party and her Zayde. In her work she compiles symbolism from personal memories like these as a way of unraveling or allegorizing a cultural or historical memory. Using a combination of drawing, painting and comics, Rosabel likens the function of her work to irrepressible laughter occurring during socially uncomfortable situations. Both arise from tension and uncertainty and challenges life’s incongruities.

Rosabel was born in Los Angeles and grew up in a conservative Jewish community in the San Fernando Valley. Upon graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017, she went on to pursue a research project funded by a Fulbright Austria Combined Research Grant in 2018-2019. Working with the Jewish Museum Vienna’s Schlaff Collection of anti-Semitic objects and postcards, Rosabel produced a series of intimate vignettes, exaggerated portraiture, and darkly humorous comics in response to the visual history of anti-Jewish hate-imagery, thus reclaiming her heritage and reconnecting to her Jewish identity. Today Rosabel’s work continues to celebrate uncanny representations of the body through satire. Fascinated by the absurdity of religious iconography and theological manifestations dominated by Christian male perspectives, Rosabel sees these patriarchal traditions as fertile ground for feminist recontextualization and adaptation.