Abandoned airports, stadiums, and communication towers are nothing more than trellises for the magenta trinitarias, thin-boled trees, vines, shrubs, and serrated fronds that weave through and around the buildings like smoke. In Gamaliel Rodriguez’s Memorias Manuipuladas, they look like tombs, ancient or futuristic, or ceremonial gathering spaces, for a lost human civilization, or one that never existed.
How does an amalgamation of financial despair and natural destruction affect the way one sees the world around them? When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, the main airport was so wrecked that it shut down for over a week. Residents were trapped in the pandemonium, thousands died, power was out, and—perhaps worst of all—the prospect of recovery was glaringly bleak. Prior to the hurricane, Puerto Rico grappled with over $70 billion in debt that the governor, Ricardo Rosseló, attributed to a “big Ponzi scheme” that benefited Wall Street. For the island’s residents, the post-Maria reality probably felt like life existed somewhere between a practical joke and a nightmare. Gamaliel Rodriguez views this as the tension between discerning chaos while searching for beauty. For his solo exhibition at the New Gallery, large monochromatic drawings present recognizable fictions amongst uncertain realities.
In Rodriguez’s art, the imagination of infrastructure can be both utopian and apocalyptic. Many buildings are rendered from the artist’s memories, imagination, and various encyclopedias. The now-unused Maracanã soccer stadium in Brazil is the inspiration for one of the structures—an example of where money can flow when a country is crippled by severe debt. “The Olympics and the World Cup,” Rodriguez says, “You have to watch out for those two. They leave countries broke. And for what? Two soccer matches?” The appearance of these structures devoid of figures and left to be grown over by plants calls to question if their three-dimensional architectural counterparts (or sources of inspiration) will one day be mistaken as representations of human greatness rather than examples of the wasteful distribution of wealth that defines our times.
Rodriguez uses a variety of materials—ink, acrylic, graphite, spray paint—to push the boundaries of drawing. He never crosses into the realm of painting because that calls for a certain looseness he’s not interested in. The drawing’s background is always the white paper or, in the case of this exhibition, the white wall. As an experiment for this specific exhibition at Austin Peay, Rodriguez continued his drawings beyond the edges of the paper and onto the gallery walls, allowing for some of the drawings to come into contact with one another (attempting to draw conclusions on their own?). In one section, rusty magenta creeps out to overlap and bleed over the buttery yellow fronds of one of the communication tower drawings. When the show is deinstalled, parts of those drawings will remain behind, forever locked into the New Gallery’s palimpsestic walls.
In his work, Rodriguez also layers imagination into history. For a previous exhibition in Puerto Rico, he plucked buildings from his imagination that looked like factories and other generic manufacturing facilities. He gave the buildings fictional names which he placed under the artworks. One man came up to him and said, “My grandfather worked in that building.” Someone else recognized another building that Rodriguez had fabricated through drawing. When people identify with the artist’s recognizable fictions, are they merely grasping for something familiar in the wake of their loss?
In 2018, Rodriguez took part in a residency at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts for Puerto Rican artists responding to Hurricane Maria where he drew several pieces included in Memorias Manipuladas. Although each drawing in this exhibition is its own island—several brushing up against one another—the grouping feels like they are in some whispery conversation with one another. The blue drawing of the airport with each airplane neatly parked at its appropriate gate is particularly disturbing in its crystallized stasis. Airports always seem to take up their own space independent of their location—estranged from whichever city they’re a part of. They are such ghostly hubs where large quantities of aggravated people appear and disappear into the air every hour. But when they are perfectly still with no movement of planes or people— what are they then? If there is no movement in an airport, what role does time possess in that space?
Many drawings in the exhibition are seen from an aerial perspective—something once understood as the bird’s-eye-view, but now more commonly (and sadly) characterized as the drone’s-eye-view. Perhaps as a result of dominant modes of seeing/visualizing during his days in the U.S. military, Rodriguez depicts most of his architectural structures from a slanted aerial perspective or, in the case of the Dark Thoughts drawings, from a satellite’s perspective. And then there is the way the aerial view flattens a sculptural, tangible surface into a smooth drawing table of sorts where towering figures become ambiguous two-dimensional shapes. As Robert Smithson described in his essay “Aerial Art” concerning the experience of looking down at the world from a plane, “…the rational structures of buildings disappear into irrational disguises and are pitched into optical illusions.”
The two Dark Thoughts drawings that resemble magnified clouds are contained within their borders with no apparent risk of spilling out on the walls. They portray the satellite’s perspective: an abstract representation of surveillance endeavors from outer space. Is the self-containment of these particular drawings a comment on the limitation of human perception? We see what the satellite sees, but we never see the satellite. We see the communication towers, but we never see what they orchestrate. In this regard, Rodriguez calls to mind the artist Trevor Paglen and his research on “the invisible visible culture” with regards to autonomous vision systems and artificial intelligence. With a certain urgency, Paglen argues that “we no longer look at images–images look at us. They no longer simply represent things, but actively intervene in everyday life.” In a similar vein, Rodriguez is interested in the way misinformation can appear official or authoritative enough to become true—especially in times of desperation or chaos. If Paglen is interested in his art functioning as a sort of reconnaissance effort, Rodriguez is on the other end of the equation, zeroing in on the aftermath (which he is already familiar with).
Upon further analysis (i.e. the dangerous part where the viewer projects symbolism into the work) of exhibition, it is hard not to see the still planes as stagnant lifelines and the communication tower as an inanimate heart. And what happens to those planes, waiting at the gate? The magnified clouds that represent abstract surveillance are a fog of distorted memories, manipulated information, the future melding with the past, the timelessness that follows the moment when time runs out.
Veronica Kavass is a writer, teacher, and criminal defense investigator. She holds a masters in curatorial practice and critical writing from Chelsea College of Art in London, and an MFA in creative writing from University of Minnesota.
She has trained as an oral historian through her work with StoryCorps, and has written about art for local/regional publications such as Burnaway and The Nashville Scene. She is the author of Artists in Love: From Picasso & Gilot to Christo & Jeanne-Claude, A Century of Creative and Romantic Partnerships, published in 2016, and is completing a book on the immigrant history of her hometown Nashville, Tennessee. |