KC ROSENBERG: SILENT REMEMBERING
June 16th – July 22nd, 2023
Silent Remembering is an exhibition that circles a task assigned to Rosenberg while working with a cognitive therapist during her healing from a mini-stroke in 2021. While the brain injury was minimal, Rosenberg struggled when listening to people telling personal stories because holding together patterns and details was a challenge. She was assigned a task to recall stories linearly and to pay attention to the order of details. As the exercise continued, Rosenberg wrote snippets of texts and developed abstract spaces that became a more fluid and creative counteraction to linear storytelling. The abstractions are an experiential remembering without identifiable voice, place, or narrative. Rosenberg also uses text with abstract paintings for associative connections to build new meanings.
Rosenberg’s material process happens mainly on the floor of her studio, where the raw canvas is walked upon and catches poured paint. Then to see what remains in the fabric of the canvas, she washes the canvas and responds further to the marks that stayed. By adding painted strips of canvas dripping with acrylic paint, Rosenberg collages on the top surface, creating optimal color combinations in fields of abstraction. The collaged lines appear empty or silent in memories and leave room for texts placed within the space to activate poetic associations.
Available Work
Dr KC Rosenberg
Born in Marin County, California, Dr. KC Rosenberg was raised in a bohemian household shaped by intellectual rigor and domestic improvisation; while her mother worked and studied law, Rosenberg and her siblings were cared for by a shifting network of caretakers, an environment whose chaos fostered early strategies of invention through imagined companions, substitute characters, and close observation of animal behavior. In 2021, medical complications during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a significant shift in her practice toward abstraction, reducing narrative certainty and temporarily setting aside personal history, which later returned as material rather than subject; these formative experiences now register in her work as form and emotional traces rather than representation. Rosenberg has exhibited with Patricia Sweetow Gallery, and her work is held in the collections of the California Arts Council and the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles. She holds an Ed.D. and conducts social research on collective mentorship systems among artists.