Lordy Rodriguez

Lordy Rodriguez focuses on two major concepts throughout his artwork, a lot are placement and representation. Being from an immigrant family, finding his social place in the US and how he represent that has always been personally important to him. As a venture into identity politics, Lordy started this body of work 15 years ago where he used the visual language of cartography to explore notions of identity, displacement, and the social issues that pop up from them. Lordy cannot say that he has come to some realization or conclusion, but rather has found a much larger idea in which some of these issues permeate. Besides the typical symbology found in maps, he has found potential in expressing some of these ideas by incorporating color schemes, patterns, and forms that derive from well known sources. When combined with the map language, the scope of the work leaps from the personal relation to placement and representation and onto a much larger scale.

His new body of work, The US Map series, begins to incorporate this strategy to exercise some ideas about this country. For example in US Map II (The Lost States), all the state names are names that were proposed to congress as new states but were never realized. Either it is a disagreement between cities and settlements that fostered a split from their original state, or the settling of a new land where groups of people decided that their interests would only be addressed if they created their own state. Some of the states that we are familiar with, like Tennessee succeeded and others like Nickajack were not. This piece plays with the idea for the natural human need to be represented. But, the need for governmental representation isn’t the only level this piece works on. By incorporating varied patterns and colors from state to state as well as a variety of fonts for the text, each state exhibits a sort of flag that differentiates themselves from others in a more social context.