Nancy Rodrigo: Clusterfuck

About

This exhibition showcases new drawings and paintings depicting entwined lines and forms, reminiscent of physiological structures. Playing with psychological notions that hover between danger and safety, she presents packed walls of knotted and tangled forms, usually with at least one pathway out. The works have removed all sense of time and scale, and invite us to take a dive into the depths of Rodrigo’s subconscious. Each cave like, labial arrangement is an imagined space – a tightly woven forest, cancerous mutations inside of a body, or the zoomed out landscape of an entire planet. The bodies and forms that Rodrigo references are of the mind, escaping practical functionality with a high level of surrealist fantasy.

The works on display are an edited selection of an impulsive, organic, and prolific practice. Her imagery comes in part out of the bodies she observed working in at Sloan Kettering hospital, but she also draws inspiration from psychedelic rock album covers and otherworldly set design. The exhibition’s eponymous series, Clusterfuck, is more overtly sinister in nature, stemming directly from Rodrigo’s own internalization of the past year and a half of political unrest. These sinewy forms are particularly strained and snarled, embedded with hints of ghostly horror. As if a warning sign, they point to the ossification of political messaging, revealing the artist’s subsequent sense of helplessness. Through each dense entrapment Rodrigo nevertheless gives the viewer a way out of the woods, leaving the smallest opening for hope in the darkness.