Rosalyn Bodycomb: The Worked Shoot

Conduit Gallery is honored to present The Worked Shoot, an exhibition of new, small scale oil on panel paintings by California-based artist Rosalyn Bodycomb.

The paintings in The Worked Shoot explore the intersection of ancient political stagecraft and contemporary professional wrestling. The project centers on kayfabe, the collaborative maintenance of a staged reality, as the primary engine of both classical and contemporary populism. To ground this conceptually, Bodycomb maps Aristotle’s cycle of government, anacyclosis, onto the modern squared circle. Aristotle argued that states rotate inevitably from virtuous monarchy to corrupt tyranny. Visually, Bodycomb illustrates this structural decay as a revolving wrestling ring, where political heels (villains) and faces (heroes) perform their predetermined roles within an ancient script of societal collapse.

The paintings bridge the aesthetic gap between realism and the visceral, muscular immediacy of Abstract Expressionism. By rendering modern demagogues through the lens of classical oratory and aggressive, physical mark-making, these paintings force a confrontation with the permanence of the historical record and the volatility of live performance.

Bodycomb was born in Hawaii, and spent her childhood in Southern California before eventually moving to Texas, where she earned an MFA in painting at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Alternative Museum in New York, the Arlington Museum of Art, The Grace Museum, and the L9 Center for the Arts. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award (2005), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2007), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2009). She lives and works outside of Yosemite Valley, California.