Bunny Rogers and the Intimate Logic of Virtual Worlds

In My Original Friend, a new solo exhibition by Bunny Rogers at SOCIÉTÉ, the emotional architectures of friendship, memory, and identity unfold through the visual language of digital culture. On view from March 12 to April 18, 2026, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a carefully staged environment where autobiography, internet-era symbolism, and psychological vulnerability coexist.

Rogers’ work has long operated within the porous boundary between the personal and the mediated. Drawing on the visual and emotional vocabulary of the late 1990s and early 2000s, her practice reflects a generation shaped by the early internet, gaming culture, and the emergence of virtual identities. For Rogers, imagination does not function as an escape from reality but as a parallel structure through which experience is processed and reconfigured.

The installation evokes the spatial logic of a video game environment. Grey brick walls, pseudo-classical columns, and flickering torchlight create a flattened, almost digital landscape, recalling the quest architecture of early role-playing games. Within this space, Rogers presents a series of self-portraits disguised through the figure of Joan of Arc from the cult animated series Clone High.

The choice is deliberate. Rather than presenting the self directly, Rogers uses Joan as a mask or avatar, displacing autobiography into a mediated form. In doing so, she echoes the ways individuals construct identity online through characters, profiles, and representations that are both personal and performative.

Each image features Joan holding a different key. These are not invented symbols but are derived from drawings of actual keys belonging to people close to the artist. Transformed into quest objects, the keys operate simultaneously as intimate relics and narrative devices. They carry the emotional residue of their owners while functioning within the symbolic grammar of game worlds, where keys traditionally signal progression, access, and revelation.

In Rogers’ hands, however, the meaning becomes more ambiguous. Keys suggest both connection and distance, entry and exclusion. They embody the delicate structures that underpin trust and attachment. Suspended between personal artefact and digital icon, they become bridges between private memory and shared visual language.

This tension between intimacy and mediation defines the exhibition’s atmosphere. The figures exist within a world that feels simultaneously ancient and virtual, sacred and artificial. Gestures are subtle but loaded, hinting at thresholds between tenderness and violence, protection and vulnerability.

Rogers’ work resists straightforward interpretation because it refuses to separate emotional experience from the images and systems through which it is expressed. The exhibition acknowledges that for many people today, particularly those who came of age alongside early internet culture, identity is inseparable from the symbolic landscapes of media and games.

By translating personal relationships into the logic of quests, artefacts, and avatars, Rogers constructs a narrative space where emotional reality is filtered through cultural memory. The result is an environment that feels at once deeply autobiographical and strangely collective.

In My Original Friend, the gallery becomes a site where the inner world is mapped through the aesthetics of the virtual. What emerges is not nostalgia for early digital culture, but an exploration of how those visual systems continue to shape the ways we understand intimacy, belonging, and the fragile mechanics of trust.