Rochelle Botello: Free Fall

January 25, 2024 - September 7, 2024

Sponsored by City of Bakersfield

The Exhibit | Gallery Card | Artist Biography | Images | Events

THE EXHIBIT

Art embodies freedom--a liberation found in surrendering control and embracing the empowering leap into the unknown. This sense of freedom grants the capacity to be fully present to free fall into one’s intuition. Rochelle Botello’s work serves as a conduit to understand the world around her through these intuitive impulses while also playing with the fusion of structure and space. The focus of her practice is the process of discovery, wonder, and curiosity. Botello’s observations of the world around her have sustained her as an artist. Observations that compel her artistic practice.

As a sculptor, her work is an attempt to capture traces of her existence. Employing everyday materials like cardboard, wood, and tape, her sculptures embody an ephemeral quality that Botello finds both compelling and absurd. The impermanence of these materials, coupled with the way they unexpectedly shapeshift and implicate activity, adds to the poetic ability of her sculptures. Trusting the creative process and embracing the unknown, Botello revels in the impermanence of forms, mirroring the wondrous inevitability of life. By merging manmade materials with the organic and poetic forms of nature, she creates a subconscious familiarity that celebrates the absurdity of life.

Her drawings, though independent of her sculptures, invoke ruminations of movement while also calling into account the transformation of character and this tension between stasis and freedom.

Although her work featured in Free Fall addresses her personal experiences that examine the relationship between the known and unknown, control and letting go, strength and vulnerability, stability and instability, these themes are universal and speak to the human condition.

GALLERY CARD

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Rochelle Botello is a Los Angeles based visual artist working across mixed media, sculpture and site-specific installations. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, extending Japan, Berlin and South Korea. She has exhibited with Holter Museum of Art, Torrance Art Museum, Jaus, Launch, Coagula Curatorial and Durden and Ray to name a few.

Her exhibitions have also been reviewed in the LA Times, The Huffington Post, Whitehot magazine, Artillery Magazine and Coagula Art Journal. Botello holds a MFA from Claremont Graduate University and a BA in Sociology with an emphasis in Social Psychology from University of California, Santa Cruz.