Meet The ARTery 25 — Millennials Of Color Impacting Boston Arts And Culture
Photo credit-OJ Slaughter for WBUR
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Allison Maria Rodriguez's video installations are whimsical and dark, alluring and alarming, beautiful and mournful. She uses drawing, collage, photography and animation to create fantastical worlds that sometimes convey the demise of our own.
She delves deep into environmental loss, transmitting the urgency of endangered animals, ways of life, entire islands. And in her colorful video landscapes, there is pain, and often trauma. When she created her resplendent "Wish You Were Here: Greetings from the Galápagos," on view at the Dorchester Art Project last year, she says she did so with a void in her stomach and a knot in her throat — acutely aware that human activity could soon decimate the island and all of the majesty could be gone forever.
What is so captivating about Rodriguez's work is how she captures trauma in the most aesthetically exquisite of ways. Her art is unapologetically dazzling. A menacing truth lies in the magical realism of the images she creates.
For her upcoming exhibit, "Legends Breathe," Rodriquez interviewed 13 female-identified artists and creatives about the power of imagination to overcome trauma. To her surprise, all of the artists' survival fantasies had an aspect of nature. Mining these interview, Rodriguez will then create an interactive installation, slated for Villa Victoria in September.
Rodriguez is also a curator. In December, she organized, "Breaking The Rules" at SoWa's Fountain Street Gallery and will curate another show there in May. Organized around the requirement of the artist to diverge from their own practice in a personal, but critical way, Rodriguez’s curatorial and discerning eye shined.
Looking at her artwork, it's clear Rodriguez is among the most rigorous and aesthetically singular visual artists in New England.
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