Artist: Carissa Rodriguez
Venue: Wattis, San Francisco
Exhibition Title: I’m normal. I have a garden. I’m a person.
Date: December 8 – February 13, 2016
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of CCA Wattis Institute. Photos by Johnna Arnold.
Press Release:
San Francisco, Calif., November 5, 2015—The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco will present an installation of new work by Carissa Rodriguez (b. 1970, New York). Rodriguez is a Capp Street artist-in-residence, and the exhibition marks the end of a three-month residency in San Francisco. Free and open to the public, the exhibition preview is on December 8, 2015, and the show runs through February 13, 2016.
As an artist based in New York City and temporary guest on the West Coast, Rodriguez follows a personal line of inquiry into everyday life in the Bay Area as it is purportedly being reorganized around the interests of technology industries and their constituents. Confronted by this distinct contemporary habitus—its lifestyles, tastes, and values—Rodriguez has produced a body of photographic work in which relationships between images raise questions about the construction of the “creative life” as it plays out publicly and privately.
Rodriguez’s work is often context-specific and not driven by any defining material in its aim to assume the role of medium itself, or “the corollary opposite of the signature object,” as she puts it. Through a series of displacements between image, site, and context, the exhibition takes specific design proposals into account in order to ask, What makes life succulent?
The work on display at CCA Wattis includes photography, sculpture, installation, and a new piece of writing by the artist. Rodriguez’s approach to exhibition making is often determined through an address of the institutions and spaces within which her work will be situated. Roberta Smith (New York Times, September 5, 2013) wrote, “Rodriguez is a latter-day Conceptual artist with a preference for physical perfection similar to appropriationist precursors like Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler and Sarah Charlesworth. Her efforts here center on the business, display and collection of art; different modes of site-specificity; and the circle, or cylinder, as a recurring form.”
After earning a degree in literature at the New School for Social Research in 1994, Rodriguez held her first exhibition in 1996 at American Fine Arts, New York. Her 1998 breakthrough project The Stand with designer Jodi Busby went on to exhibitions at P.S. 1 Museum, The Swiss Institute, and American Fine Arts, all in New York (1999); The Royal College of Art, London, Gastatelier Fleetinsel, Hamburg, and TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam (2000); and KW Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2004). Her first solo exhibition was at Forde, Geneva, in 2000 under the curatorship of Mai-Thu Perret and Fabrice Stroun. From 2001 to 2002, Rodriguez used a grant from the Van Lier Fellowship to attend the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, where she collaborated on a work for the final exhibition with fellow ISP participant Gardar Eide Einarsson.
Rodriguez was a founding director of the gallery Reena Spaulings in New York. Recent exhibitions include La Collectionneuse, Front Desk Apparatus, New York (2013); Indipendenza, Rome (2014); The Contract, Essex Street, New York (2014); and Supply Lines (curated by Richard Birkett), National Gallery of Kosovo, Kosovo (2015).
