One from the heart
Welcome to the worlds of triple-threat artist Clare E. Rojas.

By Kimberly Chun

PAINTER, FILMMAKER , and singer-songwriter Clare E. Rojas is a world traveler – in miniature.

Drawn to microscopic worlds writ weird and wildly flourishing like urban kudzu all around her, the Ohio native comes alive talking about the microcommunities she encounters, realms that range from the blue-haired, football-crazed quilting bees in her hometown to the all-night open mic maniacs she started out playing among in Philadelphia as enigmatic warbler Peggy Honeywell.

The push and pull between those fascinating external communities and the extremely personal internal world propels Rojas's art, her songs, and her works' developing mythology. It's there in her widely roving contributions to the exhibit "Pocket Atlas: Nick Ackerman, Dean Byington, Clare E. Rojas" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

And it tugs at the edges of the sweet, dispassionate folk songs she writes as Peggy Honeywell, music that she's performed at this year's Noise Pop and documented on self-released CDs and Honey for Dinner, her 2001 album on Galaxia Records. In fact, when she first got it into her head to start singing and found herself too shy to perform as herself, she stumbled over yet another community while shopping for her new identity and a long black veil of hair.

"It was funny going to wig stores and seeing these totally normal women buying wigs, and they would start talking to me and be like, 'It's fun, isn't it?' And you know, it is! Why not!" Rojas says, curled in a chair in her large wedge of a studio at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. "It just kind of struck me, women just having a ball and getting wigs just to wear every day for fun. A lot of people do it, and you don't even know. It's just fashion for them, but for me that was my persona."

The notion of escape into these microuniverses is an element of her "Pocket Atlas" contributions. One wall of the show depicts various story lines revolving around words like "Outwit" or "Outrun"; they tell not-so-grim fairy tales teeming with all creatures great and small. Longhaired figures playing football in a field of European folkloric motifs loom on murals, while others – weasel-like dogs with Egyptian eyes and toothsome grimaces, kerchiefed girls who look like Russian matryoshka dolls, and red-hooded figures shaking cherries from trees or fiddling with boomboxes – are telescoped down onto small painted wood plaques or inch-long stones.

But all is not sweetness and light in Rojas's world. Her folkloric paintings make such a strong impression that you almost miss the other pieces: the wood stage shaped like a horse, with a heart-shaped rump, that she performed on, as Peggy Honeywell, at the exhibit's opening July 25, or the obsessive calligraphy of a set of paintings nearby. Down a corridor behind her murals and miniatures, there are Rojas and Andrew Wright's culture-jamming film and "wallpaper"-like collaborations, which have them scrawling over fashion magazine images and taking hilarious stabs at media and advertising beauty standards.

The collection of disparate surfaces she chooses to paint on, her iconography and pop culture inspiration, and even the graffiti associations of her Manipulator collaborations with Wright, seem to be colored by friends like Barry McGee, slotting Rojas and her love of the handmade, heartfelt, and community-based in with McGee and others in what's been called the "Mission school." But Rojas will have none of that. She moved out here a year and a half ago after graduating with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "What is it?" she asks, genuinely puzzled. None of her friends seem eager to enroll in the Mission school.

"I'm trying to figure out a new state, which in my opinion is like a new planet. California is like no other state I've ever experienced, and the people are completely different from anything I'd ever experienced." She marvels at the fact that coffee shops are filled with seemingly jobless San Franciscans at all hours. "I thought I was pretty liberal in Ohio. Now I'm like the conservative. I'm the total Presbyterian here. Even the way people talk, they take the whole message machine tape to say hi."

Her imagery rises naturally from her life, those communities and cultures around her, such as the football culture that surrounded her as she was growing up next door to Ohio State. "You go into a grocery store, and football is on the radio," she says, describing Buckeye mania with growing excitement. "Everyone is OK with it and likes it, and everyone can get along as far as that goes. I always liked it, and then when I moved out to the East Coast and there was no football, I was like, 'Where's the season!' It's awesome to watch. They're such little characters in their uniforms, with their helmets and colors, and they're on this big landscaped field with lines."

After getting her B.A. at Rhode Island School of Design and concentrating on printmaking she moved to Philadelphia, where she made posters for exhibits. When she lost access to printmaking equipment, she started painting small pieces in her tiny apartment, though her old medium continues to be a big influence on her current miniatures. "I could silkscreen any of those in a second," she says. "There's the way you layer colors in printmaking, the graphic quality of some images."

Rojas also started playing as Peggy Honeywell, a character from her paintings that somehow became real and took her name from Peggy Lee and Rojas's heater. "I always thought music was the most powerful thing, beyond film and painting, and I wanted to try it," Rojas says. "That had to be set free. There's something about music that can set some emotions free."

Coming out as Peggy Honeywell at her opening party was one step in bringing all sides of Rojas together, and she's finally acclimatized herself to San Francisco. "It was a huge thing to adapt to, and then people asking, 'Are you with ...?' And I'm like, 'Aaaah! I don't know. I don't know. Just leave me alone.' I'll hide further in my little fantasy worlds and my paintings if you do that, and they'll just get weirder and weirder."

Soon she'll also be able to make a blanket to hide in. To one side of her studio is a table with three small paintings, lying flat and partially done, and to the other, another with a sewing machine on top and fabric swatches around its feet. The sweet, small floral patterns of handicrafts already play into her work, and now she's teaching herself to quilt.

"I'm getting more and more abstract, I guess," she says, "simplifying down to the design of textiles and patterns. But I don't know. It seems like in the art world you have to be careful how you put together what you do. Sometimes it sees like a bit of a no-no to put together, like, painting and then film and music. I always kept those things superseparate."

What's the difference when "it's all coming from the same heart?" she asks, before assuming the imagined pompous voice of some institutional art pooh-bah. "They'll say, 'Oh it looks like a different person did that,' or, 'You're not very focused.' Or you're just a jerk-of-all trades. But I was just, like, screw it. You know, I don't care. This is all one big piece of poop that I do," she says laughing and then adding firmly, "This is what I do. This is one big picture."

'Pocket Atlas: Nick Ackerman, Dean Byington, Clare E. Rojas' runs through Oct. 5, Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-6 p.m. (first Thurs., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free first Tuesday).(415) 978-ARTS.