|
 |
|
Installations |
My installations take a look at the complexities and contradictions through a surrealistic lens at the ideas of modernity and progress.
The types of materials I use and the viewer’s relation to them reflect the conflict and interplay of emotions that my art addresses. Using discarded movie sets or lower class suburban dwellings are two examples of how I juxtapose realities. This interplay of textures, colors, surfaces, and finishes are pulled from my experiences and impressions as a designer, carpenter, painter and screenwriter. The contents and materials I use challenge established norms and broaden the parameters of what constitutes art. And in doing so, I hope to build new bridges that can cross between class, ethnic, and gender borders.
|
| |
| |
Without A Passport 2006. |
| |
| The New Rome by Eugene Rodriguez is beautiful. From a distance, the work
gleams richly. Its folds of silk organza are soft, their cmbroidery finely worked.
The robes are floating on air. How lovely, Draw nearer. It becomes apparent the artist has
locked the fabrics into place upon a support of metal, an armature. Look again.
Now the viewer can see the cmbroidery fixes X-acto blades onto the sild, Beautiful, and horrifyingely dangerous. |
| (click below to get bigger picture) |
|
| |
La Mascara (The Mascarade), Dimensions Variable,Multi-Media Installation, 1994. |
| The installation is based on the real story of a chiclero (a boy that sells chewing gum to tourists for survival) who leaves his home in Guatemala becouse of parental abuse. When he arrives in San Francisco he looks for work, but speaking no English, he finds none. in the end, he joins other teen-age runways in the Tenderloin District and prostitutes himself. The story is told in red text on the windows/wings and on the paper bands that package professionaly laundered shirts in the chest of drawers as the viewer walks through the installation. There is also a video, shot in a "porn-i-sepia" tone, that peeps into the world of "working boys and their johns". The video, accompanied by a melancholia-funk, Chopin/Bowie soundtrack, reveals a wold where race, class, and sexuality merge in a post-colonial collision. |
| (click below to get bigger picture) |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Doubting the House of Fiction, Dimensions Variable, Multi-Media Installation, 1994.
|
| The installation is an exploration of being Chicano and gay. Using my chilhood home in Oxnard, California as a backdrop, the viewers explore the projections of a young boy whose home/church/dreams become incarnate. The house is divided into the typical living, sleeping, and dinind areas, however, this is a very atypical house where the generic household features are personalized - from the patterns on plates in the kitchenette and on the bedroom wallpaper to the bed itself and a confessional video closet. |
| (click below to get bigger picture) |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Proper Burial, 40" x 84" x 24", Installation with with sound, 1993.
|
| This is an altar to commemorate the death of my grandfather's brother, Toribio, who died in Central California after immigrating from Mexico during the Revolution. The town initially protested his interment becouse he was Mexican but he eventually was buried. |
| (click below to get bigger picture) |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
