Somewhere That’s Lush and Gray

Works by Iggy Rodriguez

Blanc Gallery

Syndrome of Overfunction
Jewel Maranan

In Somewhere That’s Lush and Grey, the weight of time is inescapable. Ecologies that include everything that have grown or been forced to interconnect have also overgrown into an ecology of conflicted longings and foreboding.  States of human, paralyzed in saturation, surrender to ill-fitting materialities.

Bodies take center; half-knowing vessels of history, ultimate processors of contradictions material and existential, hosts of diseases, inherent and inherited. Looking at them subsumed in a time of heightened mortality, one wonders: Did they survive? Are they evolving to survive? Or are they in hiding, waiting for a moment more conducive to living as we know it? We look at them in a time when the present is more assertive than passing yet there is a sense of antiquity, as though the bodies belonged not to persons but to an era. Whatever sufferance they have gone through, it must have been of such force that a corrugated stillness has enveloped their slow, impacted ageing. Are they imaginings of a future gazing back on its own oblivion, or are they a presentiment of what is to come?

Flora pervades the milieu, lush and ever-growing, nurtured in its own fossils and compromised in its union with the inevitable techno-fossils of a civilization—of architecture, of industries, of instruments of oppression. The manufactured has made a travesty of the natural in its advance and replication. Both bodies and flora in inter-growth and mutual invasion feed a sense of ambiguity between being dead and being alive, between progress and destruction, between beauty and disease. Violence is visible in the process. Is it possible to die of too much life?

But anatomies ultimately succumb to much larger ecologies which, in societal structures, involve systems of subjugation and their concurrent systems of desire. In the series of seven drawings, Ornamental Ruminations, the artist asks: Are we mere ornaments in the grand scheme of things? Have we been complicit in our own invasion? Indeed, there is a thin line between surrender and subservience.

The absence of faces evokes the loss of choice. Yet the stance of bodies reveals hints of competing wills—on one hand, asserting a sense of self, and on the other hand, aspiring for a universalized human. But universality cannot be absolute in human experience. For always, there are possessors and there are the dispossessed, and degrees of both. And the dispossessed are only lured to be in chronic fantasy and labor for that which is unattainable.

Whatever is out of these frames is the force to be reckoned with. These figures are only emblematic of a syndrome—the syndrome of neoliberal globalized desire that turns all that it touches into overfunctioning cyborgs, hybridizing plain existence.

Deeply interested in the core ironies of human faculties, Iggy Rodriguez continues to situate his dilemmatic figurations in the milieus of overdevelopment and relations of power, aware of the inextricable dynamic between internal being and external structures. In the motion and representation of these relations, death may be rife, but so is life.  And Rodriguez’s drawings become a function of hope, or of living itself, exerting will and influence on meaning-making and, eventually, its evolutions. The artist is alive in the same world as the spectator.