Catalog by Mayela

Catalog Mayela Rodriguez

Contents

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Mayela Rodriguez

Introduction Sculpture Photography

Introduction

Recognized since the early 2000s as a pioneer of contemporary installation art, Mayela Rodriguez uses a combination of photography, found objects, and textile-based interventions. Her work erodes the boundaries between mediums, echoing color field painting and post-painterly abstraction even as they defy flatness. They are largely improvisational, using blocks of bright color as springboards to leap 1

from one type of surface to another. As the artist has stated, “I began, and still do begin, with a love for color and unrelenting interest in the intersection of a pictorial way of looking, (or thinking), with the physical matter of the body and the materiality of things in space.” She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Dia Art Foundation and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her public commissions have included installations in New York’s Madison Square Park and Chicago’s Loop area. She is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s Lucelia Artist Award (2007), as well as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and sever al grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mayela Rodriguez remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Rodriguez’s life and work inspires creative

thinkers worldwide thanks to her enduring imagery, her artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. Her impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than her one prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” Her omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture. Underlying Mayela Rodriguez’s sense of herself as an artist was her innate capacity to function as something like an oracle, distilling her perceptions of the outside world down to their essence and, in turn, projecting them outward through her creative acts. This recognition of her role first manifested itself in street actions wherein, under

the tag name of SAMO, she transformed her own observations into pithy text messages inscribed on the edifices of the urban environment. This effort quickly became the basis for her early artistic output, including a series of text-image drawings executed in early 2011. Containing a single word, a short phrase, or a simple image referring to a person, event, or recent observation, each drawing refined an external perception down to its core. As an exhibiting painter, Rodriguez was informed by the same process of distillation in both her work’s content and its stylistic strategy. Her paintings proclaimed the existence of a more basic truth locked within a given event or thought. As her career unfolded, the young artist applied the same intense scrutiny previously reserved for the world around her to the emotional and 2

spiritual aspects of her own being. only eight years ago, Mayela Rodriguez is an ardent and insightful parIn the works of Mayela Rodriguez ticipant in the ongoing conversations the simplest gesture can be powerful that define contemporary culture. and scathingly perceptive. Her art is filled with such apparent contradic- Rodriguez developed her interest in tions: it is both public and private; exploring the “unacceptable idea” politically engaged and profound- of death as a teenager in Santa ly beautiful; and concerned with Barbara. From the age of sixteen, impermanence and mortality yet she made regular visits to the anatlife-affirming and regenerative. Al- omy department of Santa Barbara though her mature career started in City College in order to make life drawings. The experiences served to establish the difficulties she perceived in reconciling the idea of death in life. Of the prominence of death in her work (‘Study of a Sail’ (2012)) she has explained: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigour.” At UC Berkeley, Rodriguez’s understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture changed 3

significantly, and she began work on some of her most important series. ‘Club 1’ created in her second year combined the aesthetics of minimalism with Rodriguez’s observation that, “science is the new religion for many people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that really.” This is one of his most enduring themes, and was most powerfully manifested in the installation work, ‘What it Told Me was an Approximate Lie’ (2013).

Rodriguez exhibitions have taken place worldwide and her work has been included in over 260 group shows. Her contribution to American art over the last two decades was recognized in 2012 with a major retrospective of her work staged at Tate Modern. Rodriguez lives and works in Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles.

Whilst in her second year, Rodriguez conceived and curated ‘Ultraverse’ – a group exhibition in three phases. The exhibition of UC Berkeley students is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Rodriguez, but for a generation of Californian artists. For its final phase she painted 16 values from white to black on the gallery walls. Since 2011, over 80 solo Mayela 4

Sculpture

In its finished state Study of a Sail visually challenges the viewer on several levels. While it appears to be a shiny, lightweight, Mylar balloon, it is actually quite heavy and hard. Its mirrorlike surface also seduces the viewer, much as shiny silver in a jewelry store window would.

Tripod (2012) - Phoebe Hearst Anthropology Museum display armature, white string

Study of a Sail (2012) - An umbrella, a glass bottle, wire, foil, and thread

In 2012, as seen in her piece Tripod, treating them like eternal virgins. Rodriguez had the idea of encas- She would use cool white fluoresing more pieces from the Phoebe cent display light, and then encase it. Hearst Anthropology Museum and letting them just display their integrity of birth, their newness, and 8

Each nail is a frozen moment, and is filled with narrative potential. So that the viewer can make up what happened before, what happens after. And the wonderful thing is when you connect the dots between each of those frozen moments, you get this elliptical, cinematic story.

Sticks addresses the heyday of luxury and consumerism in the early 2000’s. Sticks’ surface also calls to mind the use of shiny metals in both historical and social contexts. According to Rodriguez, “Polished objects have often been displayed by the church and by wealthy people to set a stage of both material security and enlightenment of spiritual nature; the stainless steel is a fake reflection of that stage.”

DP (2014) - Lace underware, nail polish

Sticks (2012) - Found metal, wire

The content of this work is almost nothing: a gallery turned night club with bare walls in which the lights turn on and off in intervals of five seconds. This piece is based on a cycle of repetitive contradictions: each five-second phase is denied by the next. Rodriguez controls the fundamental conditions ofvisibility within the gallery and redirects our attention to the walls that normally act as support and background for art objects.

Club 1 (2013) - 2 8â&#x20AC;&#x2122;x8â&#x20AC;&#x2122; walls, black paint, black fabric, DJ sets from BBC 1 Radio

Extraneous Cloth Creature (2012) - Extraneous yarn, extraneous fabric, extraneous towels, extraneous plast bags, ladder

Metamorphosis (2012) - Found shipping pallet, white fabric, black marker, narrative

Rodriguez’s Extraneous Cloth Creature began as an inflatable, store-bought, plastic toy. It has crinkled ears like an inflatable toy, a spherical head, and stringy appendages, yet its face is blank. Employing a cliché, Rodriguez has depicted a creature eating a carrot. While it appears to be a whimsical work of art, it also raises serious questions about what constitutes art.

In Metamorphosis Rodriguez espouses superhero comic characters as legitimate catalysts for change. Discussing the rise of girl power, the artist notes, “I liked the idea of a strong somewhat promiscuous female role model, the slightly out-of-control quality of these cartoon characters.” 14

Rodriguez, who came to the forefront of the international art scene in the 1980s, situates the human figure at the core of her practice, often pointing to the body’s vulnerability and fragmentation in the modern world. Recently, Rodriguez has turned to textiles and sewn fragments of clothing for her materials—a direction she explores in this performance.

Strangers (2013) - Homework, stock photo finds, emails

These are not so much portraits as caricatures of portraits, each with a ropelike black frame that lends a seriousness to the disturbing figures Rodriguez calls “deformed characters.” Model Thinking (2013) Video installation and performance

Rodriguez is a sculptor known for her labor-intensive, methodical approach to found objects,. Here a single uninterrupted line is a pulsating, hypnotic meditation on the process of incising a linoleum block. So that the viewer can make up what happened before, what happens after. And the wonderful thing is when you connect the dots between each of those frozen moments, you get this elliptical, cinematic story.

What it Told Me was an Approximate Lie (2014) - Grey fabric, metal, thread, enneagram, ouija board

Photography

WIP (2014) What happens is that you follow a characterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a woman who essentially is alone. She goes to offices and sits and waits, she walks down the street, she sits in her hotel room. Here are photographs of other characters who she would encounter on her trip through the city. Importantly, one of the things that persists in the drama is this undercurrent of mystery, because you never really know why sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s there, and how she fits into this place.