Sandy Rodriguez examines hidden history of the Gulf of Mexico

In the paintings on paper by Los Angeles-based artist and researcher Sandy Rodriguez, each color has a defined function. She told recently Artnews. “Maya Blue connects us with our ancestors; red ocher records history; charcoal used for transformation; curd-shaped red represents blood. Walnut ink has profound medicinal and artistic significance.”

Rodriguez’s research process began with in-depth interviews with historians, anthropologists and botanists. She then forages for minerals and plant specimens to make pigments. The papers she will transfer these paints have not only special significance, but also ancestral knowledge. The amateur paper she uses in Efraín Daza, San Bablitto, Mexico, is sacred Central American bark, which is made by boiling with stones and beating fibers. This once used paper, once used by Aztec article, proves the indigenous knowledge system that survived centuries of colonization. Rodriguez described amateur performance as “illegal paper” because it was illegal in the colonial era and survived secretly until the 20th century.

In her latest exhibition, Rodriguez has unveiled a new material that uses seawater from the Gulf of Mexico to dilute her pigments and “referred to climate change as a sustained colonial aggression.” Her “resistance” at the Lingling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida (until August 10) is her most ambitious yet. Its core is Resistance chart of the Gulf of MexicoThe artist describes it as a “visual history of the cartography tradition with historic and contemporary moments of resistance.”

The amateur paper map, at 94.5 inches in size, is part of the artist’s ongoing series “Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón”, a reimagining of colonial archival materials, especially the Codex Florence, a 16th-century ethnographic document among the 16th-century middleman, by Spain’s Franciscan Franciscan Franciscan Franciscan Franciscan Franciscan Franciscan Franciscan Bernardino DeSahagounde Sahagoun. However, Rodriguez’s manuscript is a temporary socio-cultural map of the places she portrays, in this case, the Gulf of Mexico. They blend past and present resistance and environmental change history, in which the minerals, soils, insects, plants and seawater she uses are transformed into native flora and fauna, sea monsters, marine vessels, marine vessels and how she describes it as “the way she envisions for us and the different futures of the future,” she said.

The historical uprising told by Rodriguez Resistance chart of the Gulf of Mexico It was the Mixtón War in northwestern Mexico (1540-42), the 1512 Calusa Resistance in Fort Charlotte and the 1559 Luna Expedition, Spain’s largest colonial attempt, thwarted by a variety of indigenous acts of resistance, and also a hurricane. Rodriguez also includes modern state violence, such as peaceful protesters torn apart in the military police in New Orleans. In the nodding of the Florentine Code, she also includes a self-portrait ride Ocelomichi, A fabulous existence whose name is translated as “a fish like a tiger” in Nahuatl. There are other marine creatures nearby, such as dolphins, giant crocodiles and pelicans, as well as land dwellers such as agave approved bats and even how called beasts.

Resistance diagram The entire Ringer exhibition also represents a new inquiry location in Rodriguez’s practice. Her work has previously focused on border areas of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Awards, which are $30,000 and reside on the Manasota Key, brings her to Florida, where she is immersed in the state’s history, landscapes and natural materials. Just like her typical approach, Rodriguez immediately began studying native plant specimens from the region and the plant-based dyes she could make from it.

This not only leads to an immersive map of the Gulf of Mexico, but also adds further context. Sculpture installations, for example, signs of protests from reptiles, read “Kill exercises” or “Red Tide Kill”. Some of these turtles are represented as flat paper, those bones lost due to oil-related pollution or climate change. Elsewhere is a cupboard of curiosity that contains hand-painted amateur sculptures of native animals, iguanas, puffer fish and bats, linking the Renaissance origins of natural history with colonial tendencies to collect, name (or rename), and classify specimens and species. As part of its collaboration with Marie Selby Botanical Garden, Rodriguez also highlighted the endemic plants used to make poisonous arrows, dyes or drugs.

Her exploration of Florida’s natural history and vast coastline also pays homage to the cultural resilience of the Carusa people, who have lived on the southwest coast of the peninsula for centuries and resisted Spanish colonization for about 200 years. In several vignettes, Rodriguez portrays Calusa’s main Marco cat as a six-inch hardwood, former Colombian figure with a kneeling half-cat, half-human figure – a recognition of the person who made it. The original hardwood sculpture was created about 500 to 1,500 years ago, and it survived the humidity in the region as it was buried in anaerobic mud. (Currently, the pair is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.)

In Ringling, Rodriguez also mapped how the Spanish tried to colonize Florida, which was particularly rich in flowers when they arrived in 1513.Florida It refers to the Spanish “land of flowers”. ) Resistance diagram The Luna expedition depicts the history-changing hurricane that occurred on September 19, 1559. The storm thwarted a Spanish expedition of 11 ships sent by King Phillip II to establish a permanent colony and secure a key trading route for the Spanish royal family. Before they unloaded the ships, the hurricane destroyed them, leaving 1,500 settlers, including artisans, tailors and Aztec Warriors contingents, without food or aid. They established the Luna Colony (nearly present-day Pensacola), but kept moving inland due to lack of supply and food. Two years later, they gave up their settlement after the rescue. If this failed colony succeeds, then a large number of settlements may follow. As a result, the Spaniards turned their attention elsewhere in the region. This period of Florida’s coastline will never be occupied by Europeans for 139 years.

There are also different forms of resistance in Rodriguez’s ringtone exhibition. While living there, she became friends with resident Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris. She watched multiple rehearsals by Harris and his dance company, including their movements like The arrangement of dissidents 2 and Dancers second, resistance (all 2023 – 25), showing silhouettes dancing with the dark night sky. She said that when considering the ban on ritual dance during the colonial era, she said: “It is a form of resistance that embodies the role of dance.” Rodriguez also choreographed Harris with “reactions to the military police in 2020’s racial justice demonstrations, including the use of tear gas.” exist Dancers second, resistance“The translucent profile of dancers Rachel Snider and Genisis Castaneda is located in the foreground of the Florida landscape filled with tear gas clouds.”

Rodriguez is not only an art exhibition, but also considers “resistance” to be an educational place – about the past, present and future. The artist draws on her 20-year career as a museum educator, including a long term at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. (She officially retired from museum education in 2017, focusing on full-time art.) In studying the first aggression of colonialism in mainland America, the exhibition “reminds us that our colonial history is not the British, not the Spanish in Florida, but the Spanish in Florida, but the mastermind here, while announcing the training of people. The risks posed by climate change to the region. Jones believes that Rodriguez’s installation is an important reminder of Florida’s long history, eliminating “the state’s preconceived notions: resorts, theme parks, beach lifestyle,” he said. “I have been disappointed, with little or interest in understanding the country.” Real history. Indigenous cultures exist here for more than 12,000 years and continue to last. ”

Rodriguez’s “resistance” (like her overall interdisciplinary exercise) reveals hidden levels of history, where colonial resistance still echoes in the land itself. Her work reminds us of the need to participate in history as an agent of change. “We live in a very dangerous time,” Rodriguez said. “Art must create space for critical thinking, dialogue, beauty, joy and action. Looking back on factual history, keep an eye on the goals of our community to understand those times when we can protect each other.” [in order to] Persevere. ”