Winslow Garage

Monica Rodriquez
The Land of Promise

In The Land of Promise, Monica Rodriguez presents a series of drawings that reconsider the Spanish conquest of what would become California. Mixing cartographic land surveys and botanic plant studies, the artist teases out the ruling abstractions at work within the sixteenth and seventeenth century “civilizing” projects to map land, plants and people. In the juxtaposition between the cartographic and the taxonomical, a narrower definition of mapping is destabilized, while the colonial and imperial legacies are made legible in the ongoing language of neutral scientific objectivity. Mapping marks the first step in the command and domination over space. Today the Iberian Empire is gone, Alta California is now Anglo California, and yet the disciplines of science are no less formed by the demands of empire and capital.
Los Angeles-based Puerto Rican artist, Monica Rodriguez's (b.1980), art practice looks at the history and impact of Colonialism on the political, economic, and social conditions in the Americas and the Caribbean region. Rodriguez obtained an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2011, was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York in 2012-13. Rodriguez has exhibited her work internationally. Group exhibitions include Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis (2022), TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz, Spain (2021); Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA (2020); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR (2019); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (2019); LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, IL (2018); 19th Contemporary Art Festival Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2015); among others.  Land of Promise is a commissioned work organized thorough our partnership with Prospect Art