Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Produced in conjunction with the group exhibition a landscape longed for: the garden as disturbance on view at Locust Projects November 20, 2021 – February 5, 2022

Living in this moment of tension between the digital and real world, this work attempts to digitally capture the ever changing phenomena of nature.  Intangible moments of beauty are recorded in the scanned image, like the sunbeam that poked through the clouds at sunrise and left its impression on the assemblage of natural flora I was capturing.

– Cristina Lei Rodriguez

ABOUT THE EDITION

Guest curated by Adler Guerrier and Laura Novoa featuring Andrea Bowers, Sandi Haber Fifield, David Hartt, Jim Hodges, Ebony G. Patterson, and Onajide Shabaka and newly commissioned works by Ema Ri and Cristina Lei Rodriguez. The exhibition was on view at Locust Projects. 

A landscape longed for: the garden as disturbance explores the motif of the garden as used by artists in its relation to the cultivation and expression of beauty and knowledge. The works in the exhibition function around images and objects connected to and derived from the study of plants, prompting a reimagining and reinterpretation of the garden as a site for the lyrical arrangement of forms.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cristina Lei Rodriguez (1974) lives and works in Miami, FL. She received her BA from Middlebury College in 1996, and MFA from California College of Art in 2002. The objects Rodriguez creates take many forms, but all are 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), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris, Miami), Team Gallery and Deitch Projects (both New York). Rodriguez’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Perez Art Museum Miami, The Bass (Miami), Boca Raton Museum of Art, NSU Museum Ft. Lauderdale, and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum (Miami). In 2018, the artist published her first monograph “Act Natural: A Retrospective of Work 2003- 2018” with TRA Publishing. Rodriguez has also completed several permanent public artworks in Florida and is currently working on a large scale tile mural for Art in Public Places Miami. Her work has been reviewed by Modern Painters, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wallpaper, The New Yorker and Arte al Día International