An example of 'art speak'
Images for artist goo.gl/y8hiAc
‘La Collectionneuse’ ft. in Numéro
September 2013 / Press
What’s your background? Where did you study and what did you study?
Born and raised in downtown New York City in the 1970s. Attended university at Eugene Lang College within The New School for Social Research. Completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Literature, which was essentially a mixed bag of literature, post-structuralism, gender studies and cultural studies, with a Marxist slant. It was a scattered education. After years of freelance jobs and art- related projects I attended the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum.
How did your background, family and the culture you were raised in shape your identity and taste?
Both my parents migrated from the Philippines to New York City in their 20s, my father to attend graduate school and my mother to take a job at the United Nations; they met in New York. By Philippine standards they were privileged which enabled them migrate comfortably and earn the same status in the US. They seemed to embrace and be embraced by what was believed to be a “classless” society in the US at the time, relatively speaking, and they identify as New Yorkers to the core. As a native born American, I am more skeptical of the un-traumatic assimilation into the “American dream”. I definitely experienced our “otherness”, something my parents perhaps could not psychically afford to acknowledge in pursuit of ‘fitting in’. I was drawn to more marginalized subject positions for their political potential– “F.O.B.”, the racial slur for fresh off the boat. Obviously I had the luxury to explore this without living the harsh realities of an actual refugee but it has been part of how I am perceived by Anglo-Americans and Europeans who do not know better; who see a brown person adopting ‘their’ codes, amazed at my ability to pass the test. To them I will always be trespassing which is something I have fun with on many levels.
Who are your references, in art?
At the moment I am reading Sturtevant and Adrian Piper. I would not call them references. My work does not refer to theirs. They my examples or motivating forces.
Before art, my biggest inspiration was cinema, discovering these auteurs in my youth– Godard, Varda, Marker, Rouch, Rohmer, Rivette, Ackermann, and later Weerasethakul who hails from Thailand. Blissfully Yours was a defining moment in showing how the task of art, especially cinematographic art is the “invention of a people” in the Deleuzian sense of becoming. Although my work is in part object-based, my inclination is towards narrative. If you spend time with my work, the layers are there.
Who are you talking too? Who is your public?
Too soon to say who my public is, public under construction.
Could you elaborate on why and how you make transitions from art and fashion?
The economy of cultural goods and the conditions in which they are consumed, appropriated or fetishized interests me, as well as how taste mutates cross- culturally.
What do you think of desire and erotism (that’s the theme of the issue) (the anus, the tongue etc, if you can talk about the show at front desk would be good)
In my work desire and eroticism can be seen as having been reduced to detached social transactions that are then projected back as desire and eroticism. I’m curious about the tension in the work when you subtract romance from desire to end up with power, which of course gets recuperated as desire. It is on the viewer to locate where in the artwork this dynamic starts and ends.
In my show La Collectioneuse at Front Desk Apparatus I created walls to trap the overhead lighting to make a bright, void-like space that I likened to a bleached anus. In the show I toyed with positions such as top and bottom, as termed in the gay world, to talk about the middle man in the art market – the art advisor or gallerist as the mediator between artist and collector.
In exhibitions, is the notion of display important and why?
In my work conditions of display are often inseparable from the work itself.
Is your work site specific and related to exhibitions?
It is site-specific in as much as the context provokes, it is more interesting to intervene than to treat the space as neutral.
What are you working on at the moment? What is your next project?
A solo show at Gaga Mexico City in 2014.
‘La Collectionneuse’ ft. in NY Observer
September 2013 / Press
Being an artist these days involves turning oneself (and one’s art) into a brand, an object, a digital file—something to be collected, stockpiled and exchanged. Which is a concern that runs through Carissa Rodriguez’s sharp, multivalent show in the offices of Front Desk Apparatus, a hybrid art advisory, marketing agency, publisher and gallery.
Ms. Rodriguez doesn’t seem particularly irked by this reality. A longtime director at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a Lower East Side font of artistic talent and branding magic, she’s expertly surveying and surfing art world power dynamics, rather than attacking them directly in her solo gallery debut in New York, which follows an impressive run of sterling group show appearancesin the city, and superb-looking outings abroad.
On a standing wire rack in the space’s small gallery, she has deposited copies of three different postcards, each bearing a slightly tawdry, private detective-style photograph of one of her paintings (they’re all identical) hanging in one of three collectors’ homes. They’re free for the taking, inviting visitors to both consider and potentially contribute to the promulgation of her brand.
A fourth postcard has a photograph of a square of fierce Halogen lights, the very ones that are installed on the ceiling around the corner. They light a tiny, empty gallery within the gallery built of drywall and painted Super White—a send-up of the intensely bright, cold light that has proliferated in galleries in recent years and is ideal for digital reproduction.
The rise of the Super White aesthetic is in no small part thanks to the blog Contemporary Art Daily, whose proprietor Forrest Nash has collaborated with Ms. Rodriguez on a project on Front Desk Apparatus’s website, a script-generated image feed that serves up mostly photographs of attractive model types, luscious-looking cakes, celebs (including Hillary Clinton) eating pizza and portraits of a baby-faced man. The subtext may be that, in an art world as large (and flush) as today’s, artists risk becoming nothing more than producers of comfortable visuals for self-selecting consumer groups—an unpleasant digital feedback loop that risks destroying Mike Kelley’s old belief that art is “simply about fucking this up for the pure pleasure of fucking them up.”
The title of Ms. Rodriguez’s show, taken from the 1967 Eric Rohmer film, may provide a hint as to how artists can cope in this environment. (It definitely provides a model for a series of scary, funny ceramic case paint cans lined with razors that she has copied from it.) In the movie, a woman unapologetically collects male lovers. Here, Ms. Rodriguez adopts the role of the vicious collector herself, using the tropes of institutional critique—architectural intervention (those Michael Asher-esque walls) and incisive installation shots (the Louise Lawler-esque postcards)—to assemble a chilling indictment of some of contemporary art’s prevailing banalities.
In a mantelpiece in the gallery, she has embedded a Cartier ring. As you admire its elegance, perhaps even lusting after it, you may find darker thoughts about aesthetics, and power, sneaking up on you. (Through Oct. 7)
La Collectionneuse reviewed by NY Times
September 2013 / Press
There is a lot going on in and among the works in Carissa Rodriguez’s surgically precise New York gallery debut. The more you think about them, the busier it all becomes.
Ms. Rodriguez is a latter-day Conceptual artist with a preference for physical perfection similar to appropriationist precursors like Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler and Sarah Charlesworth. Her efforts here center on the business, display and collection of art; different modes of site-specificity; and the circle, or cylinder, as a recurring form. Eric Rohmer’s 1967 film , “La Collectionneuse,” provides the title and features an artwork made from a used paint can neatly embedded with dozens of razor blades. Ms. Rodriguez has recreated it in four tastefully colored ceramic vessels, blades and all. (Rohmer aside, they also evoke Giacometti’s 1931 spiked phalluslike sculpture, “Disagreeable Object,” and Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 fur-covered teacup.)
Other elements on display include a gold wedding ring, set into a groove cut in the gallery’s marble mantelpiece — a perfect wedding of two materials; and a three-wall enclosure tailored to the gallery’s lighting system — a square of fluorescent ceiling lights — that intensifies the hygienic effect of the gallery as white cube. A revolving metal rack displays four sets of black-and-white photographic postcards free for the taking: one shows the gallery’s ceiling, which has a center circle remaining from its original light, as well as the fluorescents. The other three document a series of monochromatic wall pieces by Ms. Rodriguez titled “Standing O” installed in the homes of three collectors. Round, with pronounced drips, these pieces may summon the old Sherwin-Williams logo of a globe dripping paint and the phrase “Cover the Earth,” which has a new resonance in today’s global art market. That Henry Sherwin (1842-1916) patented the first resealable paint can should probably not be ignored.
– Roberta Smith
From - https://frontdeskapparatus.com/news/