In these Dickensian times, while the “war on terror” rages on and as racist and xenophobic hostility against immigrants rises, the barrage of imagery we receive from corporate owned media seems bent on perpetuating a We-Are-The-World utopia more suited to consumers not citizens. Yet in these best and worst of times, it is important to not allow an historical amnesia to envelop this moment and hold it hostage.

My work (which includes film, video, painting and installation) investigates the ways in which transnational corporate media, while seeming to have a hold on the production/dissemination of information and entertainment, does permit for alternative means of image-making in order to forge openings of agency and resistance. This is something we desperately need to do in the twenty-first century as we grapple with transnational citizenship, labor practices, and human rights in a post-national world.

Aesthetically, I experiment with narrative to depict the various selves reflected and multiple identities refracted through a technological sieve/screen with an inherent feedback loop, which I call the “Echo” phenomenon. At a time when images can be recorded faster and disseminated with greater ease than ever before, I think it is important to cultivate critical inquiry. What is our relationship to these screens? What do they show/tell us about ourselves and our relationship to technology? Always on my mind is the question, “How can emerging new technologies, in contrast to mainstream media, be utilized to present a broader and more diverse showcase of people's lives?”

Artist Biography

A San Francisco based artist, Eugene Rodriguez’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking, film, video, and installation. For the past ten years, his artwork has increasingly become more focused on the intersection of issues of labor, immigration, class, gender, sexuality and family. Aesthetically, all the work questions the superficial and disinterested form of postmodern appropriation and instead aims to inspire a revitalized look at the ability of narrative and realism to generate dialogue about the content of the art, as well as the political stakes of self-representation.

Eugene Rodriguez has been featured in solo exhibitions at Tribes Gallery, Franklin Furnace and Gallery 49 in New York and Encantada Gallery in San Francisco. He has also been included in group exhibitions across the United States and Canada. In addition to exhibiting, he has curated exhibitions around the Bay Area and has presented at conferences in New York and Los Angeles. His film/video work has been featured in numerous national and international film/video festivals. Most recently his latest film, WIN, was awarded first prize by Robert Storr, Dean of Fine Arts at Yale University and director of the 2007 Venice Bienale.


ENDLESS SERIES

ENDLESS is a multidisciplinary series comprised of oil paintings, ink drawings, relief and intaglio prints. At the heart of the series is the subject of war. What does it mean for a nation to wage an endless campaign of war? What costs are incurred for the nation waging that war? What are the physical, emotional, psychological, and financial effects to all persons involved? Is war inexorable or is it possible to end endless war? The series attempts to render all the above and more.



FLOOD SERIES

1. n . a very large amount of water that has overflowed from a source such as a river or a broken pipe onto a previously dry area

2. n . a very large number of people or things

3. vt to send a very large number of calls, letters, or complaints to an organization (usually used in the passive)

4. vi to feel a particular emotion, sensation, or memory suddenly and intensely

5. vt to supply too much of a product to a market, pushing prices down and keeping them low

6. vti to shine strongly so that a place becomes filled with a bright or glowing light (literary)

Eugene Rodriguez has a way with words: cutting to the chase, revealing what has been hidden, and interrupting conventional practices and belief systems. From the start, his focus has been on the Latino family, but in a way that stands out from other Latino visual and media artists, whose work often locates political resistance within cultural traditions. In Straight, No Chaser (1995), for example, Rodriguez combines the American avant-garde film (and Warhol in particular) with the Mexican telenovela in order to produce a stylistic hybrid suitable to his subject: redefining the traditional notion of the Latino family in order to account for gay desire, sexuality, and relationships.

Rodriguez seeks neither integration ("we are just like you") nor radical alternatives ("we are nothing like you"), but rather the messier in-between where a common ground must be based on difference-in-dialogue. This common ground – like the genetic diversity of the wetlands – is quickly drying up in our current political climate and media culture. If politics has been reduced to red-and-blue states, and the media to black-and-white viewpoints, Rodriguez's work emphasizes chiaroscuro, surrealism, and silence gazes. Indeed, if Rodriguez has a way with words – especially in the titles of his works – the work itself often does away with words, avoiding the expression of clear-cut positions, motivations, and outcomes.

What is most noticeable about Rodriquez's films, videos and paintings is that they are rooted in the vignette. He does not tell master narratives – the reassuring myths for our times or about our nation, culture, foreign policy – but rather presents us with brief scenes that suggest a before and after, but that leave the details and the outcomes open for discussion. We need such discussion; we need it to flood our society, and our emotions.

In Flood (2006), Rodriguez provides three vignettes, exploring: the decadence of celebrity culture; masculinity in a time of war and surveillance; and the post-apocalyptic couple. These distinct vignettes feature Latino actors, but the stories are global, speaking to a world overrun with certainty, yet riddled with contradictions, turmoil, and darkness. Latinos have been described as a flood overflowing into the United States . What if, Flood suggests, Latinos flooded the nation with a glowing light, or a memory, that things could be different?

Chon A. Noriega
Director and Professor
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE

In Rodriguez’s own words, " My paintings and experimental narrative video, entitled THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE, address the experiences of working class Latinos through images gleaned from my family’s photo album".

Some of these are: piñata picnics in the park; maquiladoras (factories, really sweatshops, on the borders between the United States and Mexico); the zoot suit riots, the lives of women employed in the cannery; street corner day-laborers, the 70's Hollywood bar scene, a Pentecostal baptism, and the shopping carts of the homeless.

"In my paintings, for THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE, I have used the stills from an experimental narrative video---by the same title. These are situated simultaneously on a river bank where my grandparents settled after migrating to California from Mexico, and in a movie studio. The action in the film revolves around a picnic, real but staged, with a group of friends debating the value of art and the making of a commercial about family memories." Eventually the two stories mesh, demonstrating the Latino experience in America from the past to the present (from the working to middle class). As more and more Latinos and Latinas enter the middle, class, Rodriguez believes, "It is imperative to continue to discuss the interaction of issues, such as labor, immigration, class, gender, sexuality and the family".

"Besides reminding ourselves of where we have come from, we must examine our lives in the present and ask ourselves, ‘Where are we going?’ in order to envisage a more productive, meaningful and promising future for all of us." - E.R. May, 2004