Artist Statement
“I came across a puddle one afternoon where gray clouds moved fast across the acidic sunset resembling smoke. It reminded me of the background from Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The fluorescent cones and mesh transformed into nets and ropes that caught fire. The swaying power and telephone lines resembled towering sails and riggings that moved uncontrollably due to an approaching storm. The reflection mirrored oppositions, contrasting power to the spiritual and conquest to transcendence. A space that symbolized construction and progress reflected chaos and destruction. It reflected a space overcome by vertigo.”
At every construction zone, a reoccurring image denies its refusal to be overlooked and forgotten. The ruins of the past restructure themselves by delineating a passage that acts as a point of slippage: oscillating in and out of form. Intersecting vectors from telephone poles, cranes, and wood debris build up geometries and cruciforms that accumulate to semblances of ships. At this scene, trajectories of histories and traditions collide. The reoccurring afterimages trigger memories of the impact, memories that are migratory, unstable and in constant flux.
The manipulation of fragments from objects found (such as antique furniture parts, plastic crates, magazines, books, etc.) are used as words that can be negotiated, arranged and rearranged into endless visual and communicative statements, deconstructing and reconstructing, ordering and shifting. Embracing change through my working process as well as through my use of materials, such as tape, allows me for quick modification and restructuring. The conditional and situational placement of these materials within the architectural container reshuffles their value, function and origin, reclaiming them as building blocks, leaving the finalized sculptural forms to express the potential to shift, morph, or be perceived in new contexts. Through the investigation of exploding and imploding forms, progress and destruction, I address how the perception of these conditions can be shaped by what is visible or hidden.
May 2012
At every construction zone, a reoccurring image denies its refusal to be overlooked and forgotten. The ruins of the past restructure themselves by delineating a passage that acts as a point of slippage: oscillating in and out of form. Intersecting vectors from telephone poles, cranes, and wood debris build up geometries and cruciforms that accumulate to semblances of ships. At this scene, trajectories of histories and traditions collide. The reoccurring afterimages trigger memories of the impact, memories that are migratory, unstable and in constant flux.
The manipulation of fragments from objects found (such as antique furniture parts, plastic crates, magazines, books, etc.) are used as words that can be negotiated, arranged and rearranged into endless visual and communicative statements, deconstructing and reconstructing, ordering and shifting. Embracing change through my working process as well as through my use of materials, such as tape, allows me for quick modification and restructuring. The conditional and situational placement of these materials within the architectural container reshuffles their value, function and origin, reclaiming them as building blocks, leaving the finalized sculptural forms to express the potential to shift, morph, or be perceived in new contexts. Through the investigation of exploding and imploding forms, progress and destruction, I address how the perception of these conditions can be shaped by what is visible or hidden.
May 2012
Sylvia Houghteling on Abel Rodriguez's Consequences of a Dream Deferred
Yale University, New Haven, CT., 2010
In Abel Rodriguez’s work, stasis is always temporary. The verticals of his structures – a shipmast? a telephone pole? – are interlaced by string ladders, jags of plastic, juicy red stirrers. Abel’s approach to composition looks something like constructivist mending; the diagonals sliced by his thin strips of wood are out of El Lissitzky, but the steely, tensile utopianism is not. The nets he’s woven and the sails he suspends have gaping holes, they are ripping, decomposing, moving on.
Abel’s grandfather was a fisherman and a boatbuilder in Mexico and every year, he made a religious float that glided along the water on top of his boat. Abel says that here at Yale, he cannot conjure a painted deity, framed by paper flowers and golden lights floating on a lake. Yet he’s carried this spectral ideal into this white-washed space, placing his light interruptions in conversation with the walls, the staircase, the too-high windows up above. He wants us to look up, to feel as though we are below the horizon, perhaps somewhere in the water. He’s taken away our ground. We can’t grab hold of anything, either – the verticals -- shipmasts, telephone poles – are swathed with things too frenetic, like crossing lines of rope and shattered mirror pieces. The eye relocates, the body repositions and Abel has us moving again.
These are pieces of work: they look made, handled, repaired with tape, piping, string; rigged to keep going. Like a muffler wired to the bottom of a car or a hood kept from flapping up by a belt of string. Abel’s parents were migrant workers in California and while he was growing up, his family relocated wherever there was work. Abel finds himself attracted to materials that people no longer use, to objects that others have moved on from. To some degree, he relinquishes control over his works, saying that, like Cézanne, he understands that the landscapes he’s rendering are always changing. Growing up in constant motion, Abel approaches his sculptures as sites of negotiation and he allows space for diagonal lines of flight. He builds in the round and it becomes unclear whether something is coming or going. Each cross of rope or drip of plastic can be ready at moment’s notice to move, to become part of the next thing.
In one work, a painting done on tarp and hung so that it can wave on the wall, Abel shows what it is to collide one’s present state with memories of the past. He’s painted his brother on a bike, an image from a photo he has, and yet he’s created a chaotic nest of lines around him. Silver mylar radiates out from the figure. The painting is large and hung on the wall, it looks like a Baroque religious piece with splinters of silver light emerging from a saintly center. The blue tarp is translucent; light comes in from behind and reflects off the front of it; like a memory or an idea of the divine, it is not solid or stable, but floats in constant movement just above our heads.
Abel’s grandfather was a fisherman and a boatbuilder in Mexico and every year, he made a religious float that glided along the water on top of his boat. Abel says that here at Yale, he cannot conjure a painted deity, framed by paper flowers and golden lights floating on a lake. Yet he’s carried this spectral ideal into this white-washed space, placing his light interruptions in conversation with the walls, the staircase, the too-high windows up above. He wants us to look up, to feel as though we are below the horizon, perhaps somewhere in the water. He’s taken away our ground. We can’t grab hold of anything, either – the verticals -- shipmasts, telephone poles – are swathed with things too frenetic, like crossing lines of rope and shattered mirror pieces. The eye relocates, the body repositions and Abel has us moving again.
These are pieces of work: they look made, handled, repaired with tape, piping, string; rigged to keep going. Like a muffler wired to the bottom of a car or a hood kept from flapping up by a belt of string. Abel’s parents were migrant workers in California and while he was growing up, his family relocated wherever there was work. Abel finds himself attracted to materials that people no longer use, to objects that others have moved on from. To some degree, he relinquishes control over his works, saying that, like Cézanne, he understands that the landscapes he’s rendering are always changing. Growing up in constant motion, Abel approaches his sculptures as sites of negotiation and he allows space for diagonal lines of flight. He builds in the round and it becomes unclear whether something is coming or going. Each cross of rope or drip of plastic can be ready at moment’s notice to move, to become part of the next thing.
In one work, a painting done on tarp and hung so that it can wave on the wall, Abel shows what it is to collide one’s present state with memories of the past. He’s painted his brother on a bike, an image from a photo he has, and yet he’s created a chaotic nest of lines around him. Silver mylar radiates out from the figure. The painting is large and hung on the wall, it looks like a Baroque religious piece with splinters of silver light emerging from a saintly center. The blue tarp is translucent; light comes in from behind and reflects off the front of it; like a memory or an idea of the divine, it is not solid or stable, but floats in constant movement just above our heads.
