Gate D31 Gallery North Terminal, Concourse D October 1, 2022 – March 5, 2023 Cristina Lei Rodriguez creates her images by arranging exotic orchids and South Florida foliage on a digital scanner. By leaving the scanner lid open, Rodriguez records the changing natural light of the sky while documenting the vitality of the plant’s life. The final highresolution scan magnifies the flora’s details, while creating abstraction and digital interruptions. The studio process marries technology with the natural world while furthering the tension between what is artificial and authentic. Each image is a moment in time visually recorded and documented into the artist’s increasing archive. Rodriguez’s art practice cultivates native and tropical plants in her garden as a study and mediation on how nature adapts, thrives, fails, and is born again. It is the artist’s source of illumination on the complexity of life and the ever-changing world we live in. Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s landscape images create a visceral connection to the hot, wild, lush habitat of Miami’s tropical life that is encountered the moment one steps outside the airport and feels the humidity on one’s skin. Digitizing the Phenomena of Nature (Orchids at First Light, July 18, 2020, 7:19am) 2020 | Digital print on reflective vinyl, metal | 48 x 35 in. | Courtesy of the artist
ABOUT THE ARTIST Cristina Lei Rodriguez lives and works in Miami.
Rodriguez received her B.A. from Middlebury College in Vermont and her M.F.A. from California College of Arts in San Francisco, CA, in 2002. The art Rodriguez creates takes many forms, but all are inspired by the complexity of nature and made from common materials that are given a new intangible life. Her work is organic and minimalist yet pristinely finished, echoing a tension between the natural and the artificial. Her art has been exhibited internationally and nationally at museums, institutions, and galleries such as the Serpentine Gallery (London), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York City), Galerie
Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris, Miami), and Team Gallery and Deitch Projects (both New York City). Rodriguez’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass (Miami Beach), Boca Raton Museum of Art, NSU Art Museum (Fort Lauderdale), and the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum (Miami). Her recent local public art commissions are on view at the Westchester Cultural Arts Center, the Miami Design District, Miami Herbert Business School, and Miami International Airport. cristinaleirodriguez.com Above, Front and Back Cover Sultry Blossoms in a Periwinkle Sky (January 7, 2021, afternoon sessions) 2022 | Site-specific mural (detail) | Digital print on matte vinyl | Courtesy of the artist
ACKNOWLEDGMENT Art printed by Damaso Diaz and Alex Diaz, Printer’s Cove in Miami, Florida. Native plants and orchids used by the artist were sourced and grown in Homestead and Redland, Florida.