The 30-year-old artist hails from San Francisco, and her work jibes with that town's fascination for the aesthetics of folk art and street art. While San Francisco artist Barry McGee's work springs from the jazzy, muscular declarations of graffiti, Rojas's art rises from the intimate stitching and designs of quilts.
Walk through the front doors of the museum, and you're engulfed in the sound of running water and the vision of a giant quilt. It's made from plywood blocks coated with house paint and arranged from floor to ceiling in an unfolding design through which Rojas threads landscapes and folktale narratives. One hilarious wall features paintings of a bevy of soft-bodied men, most of them nude, many of them preening and posing provocatively, the way a buxom blonde might appear in a beer ad.
Another nude man, this one a sculpture, turns out to be the source of the sound effects. He stands on the landing between the two floors, peeing endlessly into the museum's ground-floor pond. A video monitor perches beside him, with a video of Rojas (or Honeywell) placidly strumming her guitar and singing in the middle of a wild frat party. The message is partly that boys will be boys. Even so, Rojas is not writing men off: The titular eternal spring seems embodied in the bladder of this blithely urinating fellow.
If the men are comic relief, the women in Rojas's installation are warriors and priestesses. The diamond and pinwheel patterns that surround them seem to be part of their magic, as are the large hex signs that rise like the sun here and there. One old woman wears a headscarf. A pattern of lines falls from her mouth like a slide, and diamond-headed figures parade up it to deposit gems into her mouth, as if she's a goddess requiring sacrifice.
