This summer, Leiminspace proudly presents The Bat Bomb Triptych (or The Military Industrial Complex Casting Gold Idols to Unclean Birds and the Shadows of the Cave), a solo exhibition of works by painter Rose Briccetti. In this exhibition, Briccetti highlights her recent large triptych painting alongside an installation of materials excavated from the rich research practice upon which the piece is built. 

      The imagery in the work originates from the story of the Bat Bomb, a failed U.S. Military project which aimed to strap incendiary napalm devices to Mexican Free-tailed Bats during World War II. Bat iconography along with imagery from the fields biology and history intermingle with word associations, puns, and pop culture to densely populate the three diorama-like panels. The panels evolve traditionally from left to right, beginning in an Edenic setting featuring a desert sunset in the Mexican Free-tailed bat's habitat, traveling then to a zone of earthly pleasures located in Batman's Batcave, and ending in a dark and cavernous hellscape. Unclear whether they have been hoarded or collected, the materials around the painting are at once museological and conspiratorial, toeing the line between taxonomic and insane. Meanwhile, the constellation of images that appear in the work travel along their own convoluted trajectory of conscious associations and tongue-in-cheek references, reflecting the artist’s fascination with cyberculture.  Artworks, magazine pics, thrifted bric-a-brac, bat toys, googly eyes, sketches, stickers, rhinestones, ribbons, tacks, silk plants, and false eyelashes are gathered, collaged, reorganized, and showcased in a maximalistic installation that explodes with the artist's parallel practices of research and painting, projecting their fruits out into the physical space of the gallery.

      Rose Briccetti is an intermedia artist and professor living and working between Southern CA and Florida. She has a BFA from the Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from The University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited internationally at spaces including SOMArts, The Santa Paula Museum of Art, The Dickinson Museum Center, Eastside International, PØST, and Left Field Gallery. Briccetti’s work has been featured in Flavorwire, The Advocate, Jezebel, and Apartment Therapy.