Scholarship & Research
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Item Contested terrain(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2016) Rodriguez, Horacio Rafael; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Josh DeWeeseAs a product of multiple cultures and identities, my art is used as a vehicle to explore the creation of my personal narrative within the hybrid cultures of the borderlands. I am interested in generative questions such as: What role does spoken and visual language play in the transmission of culture? How did my loss of language at a young age disconnect me from my culture? What symbols, synonymous with my culture, could be transformed and infused with new meaning? How can I overcome and transform racist language and ideologies that I have confronted in my life? What do I have to say about my past and do I want to form those memories in my work? My thesis exhibition is about the many borders I have crossed in my life. I carry many of these borders with me in my memories, and produce work about these physical and psychological borders through a variety of media. Clay, photo, installation and sculpture come together to create a body of work that allows me to navigate the borderlands that I occupy. The use of personal and pop imagery allows me to construct my story, facilitate the creation of my identity and push my audience to explore their identity.Item Remarks(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2001) Breton, HopiReference to material culture is the key point of departure for my work. I explore human sensibilities by interpreting our interaction with our material world. Ambiguous allusions to human inventions, or constructs, set up a dialogue between the viewer and my work. I appropriate both utilitarian objects and language in order to trigger a memory bank of common forms and expressions. Like tools, human expressions respond to human needs. I believe material culture human history encompasses all human creations. My work references an impulse to record human history through the collection of common objects and expressions. I abstract these objects and written expressions in order to create a sense of wonder. Ultimately, I compose a sense of human history by eliciting recognition of material culture while creating a new context for common forms and expressions. Rhythm, letters, words, and other "marks" inspire much of my work. My uses of invented symbols and signs ambiguously suggest language. I push the relationship between object and language by compounding these two elements within individual works. The cast iron in Marks, allows letter-like forms to take on three-dimensional qualities. The cast iron gives these flattened marks a strong physical presence, and alluded to industrial culture. Because of their linguistic format and gestures these hybrid objects read as components of a sentence or word. Similarly, Notation, Keys, and Re-Make read as recognizable sequences of objects. The use of text and signs as surface treatment on other forms also response to the relationship between language and object. The signs and text also allude to industrial material culture, suggesting power lines. frequencies, codes, and standards. The marks insinuate a utilitarian meaning, but an unaffected disregard to function and formal concerns determine my intention beyond simply reproducing manufacture objects.