Lordy Rodriguez:The Exhibition


The body of work that's at the Austin Museum of Art is a series that I've been working on for the past decade.

It just recently ended, I just finished the last piece for it about a year and a half ago, and it's my reconfiguration of the United States based off of my own interaction with this country on a state by state basis.

But at the same time, I've added five extra states, so the total number of states is fifty five.
At the time, when I first started this project, the kind of map that I was appropriating was the road map, an homage to a point to the road map by making fifty five states, because at the time the national speed limit for driving was fifty five miles per hour. And what's quite distinctive about these five extra states is that they exist in real life as a place, but they're not official, but there's a sense of sovereignty associated with them.

Disney World is a prime example of that. Disney World being one of the first places that used 911, a 911 system, that have commercial and residential areas combined with the landscape that they've fabricated.

Another one is the Internet, the state of the Internet that I made is reflective of the virtual space that the Internet exists in.

There is Monopoly, which isn't really a sovereignty in itself, the game is associated with the layout of Atlantic City. But the meat of the state of Monopoly is closer to the  Fortune 500 companies that I was looking at at the time and their headquarters, and how these Fortune 500 companies create a landscape within those small towns.

For example, Bentonville, which is the headquarters of Wal-Mart, it encompasses the whole identity of the town, so Monopoly deals with that. 

Territory is another state, Territory is a state that has all the places that the United States has occupied or territorialized over it's history which includes the Philippines, where I'm from.

Raising questions is probably one thing I think art is always really good at. What I would be asking here is with this work, is how these maps that we do work with everyday, how they effect us on a daily basis.

How does, when I plug in an address, for a place I got to go to on Mapquest, the path Mapquest makes for me, is that the most efficient, or the most conducive to commercial interaction?

It's these new relationships we have with maps that I would want to question and have the audience to question by looking at the work that I make.