We are pleased to announce Issay Rodriguez’s second solo exhibition at Silverlens. Rodriguez is also participating at the 57th Venice Biennale "Viva Arte Viva", curated by Christine Macel, opening mid-May.

There is much emotion instilled in our habits when we find ourselves in the orbit of collectivity of the so-called oblivion. Oblivion does not simply mean a lack of remembrance or amnesia, but rather represents a way of how the past enunciates itself to the present. Thus, Issay Rodriguez takes these silent emotional signifiers of oblivion strewn across the material culture of everyday life into the gallery with utterance into her second solo exhibition at Silverlens. Stemming from her interest in the traces inscribed by the passing of time, the exhibition invites the audiences to engage in a dialogue with the tangible traces by exercising their sensory agency and haptic perception. The dialogue of the tactile eye and a sense of unbounded intimacy are explored through a series of framed works on paper; in conjunction with an installation of white fabric books, encouraging audiences to flip, to touch, and to feel.

The subtle criticality of Rodriguez’s presentation at this exhibition demonstrates her serious engagement with the objecthood in ordinary circumstances of a household. For instance, piled up at the gallery corner, the laundry in the form of blue powder reminds its viewers of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Unlike Gonzalez-Torres’ allegorical commemoration of his loved one, Rodriguez’s presentation highlights the structural erasure of housework in the everyday social experiences. There are also her framed punctured sheets of tracing paper, in layers inside each frame. As the result of punctured marks created by the artist and the artisan who work with her, not only does it produce a sense of familiarity to the processes of tailoring but also suggest an active mode of reading through these Braille-like markings on the outermost surface of the layered tracing papers.

In a book titled Names of History; on the Poetics of Knowledge, French philosopher Jacques Rancière indicates, “that history in our century will reclaim as its realm –in place of ambassadors’ letters or of the paperwork of the poor, the multiplicity of spoken words that do not speak, of messages inscribed in things.” In this context, Rodriguez’s artistic process in presenting 27 sets of framed punctured sheets of tracing paper transforms ・・・ from a free floating signifier into a mnemonic tactic for the unsung beauty of the mundane labor. Her deliberate choice of ・・・(the only presence of text in the exhibition) emancipates the act of communication from expression and turns the purpose of dialogue reflectively back to the intimate moment when the two ends sense each other. It also signifies a moment of nostalgia, manifesting itself by the artist’s reference to traditional processes of embroidery stitches which are not in the visual representation but in the visibility of her laborious endeavor. This is shown in the tangibility of that needlework presented in the installation of fabric books. In ・・・, Rodriguez articulates expressions of collective memories in a non-verbalized manner in the poetic utterance of time.

The juxtaposition between the paper works and the installation of fabric books might be seen as an invitation for audiences, whose participation of sewing or drawing can be considered part of the “reading” and practice of the labor history that has deprived its access to written words. By doing so, Rodriguez reveals the sense of the dialectic tension between the valuable and the residual in the following cases; between textuality and tactility, between the readability and the sensing capability, and lastly between the written history and silence of social memory.

Words by Fang-Tze Hsu

Issay Rodriguez’s practice is an amalgamation of all the influences she has accumulated and experienced as a co-producing laborer and collaborator. She works towards developing modes of articulation that uses strategies of chance, accuracy and reconfiguration. She employs a collage of techniques to convey a fusion of identities, places and memories. The possible narratives are derived from converging and diverging processes, spaces, materials, contexts and situations.

Currently shifting her focus to a more research-oriented and community-based approach using digital media and photography as the most viable, accessible, democratic and widely used medium of the contemporary generation, Rodriguez thinks about image and objectmaking to counter alienation caused by daily dose of technology that envelopes post-modern life. In her process, she reflects many layers and approaches to exploring the concept of nostalgia through the use of the internet and other technologies made available today. Without verisimilitude as the main goal, she explores on ways to combine them with timeless but classical laborious modes of production in the field of Fine Arts like technical drawing & painting and tactile/sensory, sometimes participatory, art projects in this age of fascination for the fast, instant but distressing world of optical pleasure.

Rodriguez obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines, Diliman and was awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award and ”Gawad Tanglaw” in 2013. She also studied as an exchange scholar at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris under the auspices of the French Government where she took short courses on Fresco and Wood carving for their classical old-world charm. She has exhibited her works in Venice, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Taipei, Manila, New Delhi, Dubai and Paris. She has also been recently selected to participate in the exhibition Viva Arte Viva to be held at the Central Pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennale this year.