Blanca Estela Rodríguez is a Mexican artist, whose multinational (im)migration experience informs her interest in exploring themes of identity and the site specificity of perception. In luminous acrylic glass works, Rodríguez creates metaphorical spaces that reductively explore the illusion of a stable reality. The limitless shifts in perception based on light, color, and proximity mimic the complex interplay of intention and reception in cross cultural communication, understanding, and experience.
Influenced by her ongoing research of geometry in relationship to perception, Rodríguez is fascinated by the concept of intersecting lines meeting or (never meeting) in infinite space. Despite static architectural shapes and lines, that which is solid seems to dissolve and a viewer’s experience is never quite the same depending on the atmospheric elements. Shapes appear to bend as reflections confuse boundaries, and shadows complicate the core structures of each sculpture. The instability of a fixed identity enhances these works, and mirror the artist’s own ever evolving identity; enriched by each country she has inhabited, and received differently dependent upon time, place, cultural and linguistic nuance. The hypnotizing ways in which Rodríguez’s work plays with perception invites a viewer into imaginary, almost private spaces. The shifting beauty is both structural and atmospheric, projections and preconceptions, real and imagined facts, play tricks on the mind and color the experience.
Rodríguez came to this type of three dimensional work by way of art photography. In intimate portraits of immigrant women, the artist was trying, by a different type of light, lens, and shape manipulation, to express the multilayered identities of these women, and the richness of their forgotten or erased identities. Later, the artist would use digital media to break down the structure of portraits into the most simple lines of the face. These line drawings were projected and made into dimensional sculptural installations meticulously rendered first in thread, and later in glowing EL wire. The EL wire works were created in Plexiglas structures, which began the artist’s inquiry into this media.