The Front Room Gallery is proud to present, “The Rutting Season,” a solo exhibition of new works by Emily Roz. This series of paintings play with the volatile activity of animals competing to satiate themselves amidst a perpetual spring of bloom and decay. Through heightened realism, flowers, seedpods, branches and carcasses coexist in a world of dreamlike unreality. As the animals in these scenes fight for position under the teasing petals, the muted color backdrops preserve the freshness of such eroticism found in nature and violence. The palette in Roz’s paintings captures the deep hues and tones of a dawn and dusk atmosphere, which are the prime hunting times for the predatory animals she depicts.

The ‘rut’ is the breeding season of ruminant animals, which makes them vulnerable to predators, as they are distracted with their desire to mate. Emily Roz captures the tenuous balance between this animalistic desire to mate and propagate, paired with the need to feed and kill. These carnal urges are reflected in their flora counterparts with blossoming flowers, sprays of budding tips and foreboding barren branches. The luminous arousal of either flora or flesh is temporal, regardless of the promise of one’s cyclical return and the other’s inevitability.

Roz’s paintings present the ambition of spring and the voracity of nature through compositions of stark, fruitless tree limbs, echoed in the understructure of delicately interwoven curtains of blooms and blankets of lush green. The balance of these selected floral components with the harsh realism of perched predators and open flesh heightens our awareness of our own vulnerability and natural desires.