ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring works by Renee Royale and Binh Danh, bringing together practices that examine colonial legacies, systems of extraction, and the enduring questions of identity, belonging, and being. Through materially driven processes and historically grounded imagery, both artists contend with how bodies, land, and memory are shaped by power.
Binh Danh’s series All I Asking for Is My Body (2024) consists of daguerreotypes made on antique colonial-style silver platters. Drawing its title from Milton Murayama’s 1975 novel, the project examines the histories of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and African laborers exploited by American plantation systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Danh sources vernacular photographs and stereographs depicting plantation labor and oversight, images shaped by what scholar E. Ann Kaplan has termed the “imperial gaze.” By transferring these photographs onto silverware, objects emblematic of colonial wealth and domestic power, Danh inverts this gaze. The reflective surface draws the viewer in, linking the present to histories of forced labor, dispossession, and loss of bodily autonomy.
Renee Royale’s work approaches related histories through ritual, ecology, and duration. In Landscapes of Matter (2021–2023), Royale documents ecologically impacted sites in Louisiana using a Polaroid camera, then submerges the exposed prints in water, dirt, and plant matter for a full moon cycle. This time-based process registers what the artist describes as the “slow violence” of settler colonialism and slavery; systems that have irreversibly altered both human and natural worlds. Enlarged and abstracted, the resulting images bear the marks of environment and time, transforming landscape into witness.
Rituals of Belonging extends Royale’s inquiry into collective identity and survival. Returning repeatedly to the same site along Lake Michigan, the artist created images from a fixed vantage point and gathered lake water to “undevelop” the photographs. Through this sustained engagement, Royale asks: What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be excluded? And what are the costs—social, bodily, existential—of difference or transcendence from the group?
Together, Royale and Danh examine how histories of colonialism persist within materials, landscapes, and bodies, offering works that hold the past in the present as a reminder of these unresolved histories.
