Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Forever

Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s Forever presents a survey of sculptures and installations from 2003 through 2010. Among the works will be Greenhouse, a large-scale installation that was featured in 2009 at the Athens Biennale and at Art Basel Miami Beach Art Projects. A grouping of small works and a selection of major works from past solo shows establish a chronology and present the evolution of Rodriguez’s art. She also debuts a new body of work entitled Gravity and Decomposition. Silvia Cubina, Director of the Bass Museum of Art, described Rodriguez’s work as “intricate sculptures and installations [that] play with the real and fake, while exploring the preciousness of materiality.” First inspired by artificial flowers and how they are always portrayed perfectly in bloom, a fantasy frozen in time, Rodriguez began this body of work during graduate school in 2002. Once she began working with plastics she realized she could alter this mass-produced object and make it appear to be in a process of growth or decay. Throughout the last seven years her work has delved into the aesthetics of desire that are part of the consumer products that surround us. The works are primarily sculptural landscapes, sometimes very realistic and other times very abstract. Their plastic surfaces come with all of the signifiers of the medium — plastic is about eye candy, being new, disposable, artificial, and glamorous all at the same time.