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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > April > 10 > Entry
Lordy Rodriguez sees new states of America
It’s been a long road trip for Lordy Rodriguez.
The Phillipine-born Texas-raised artist has spent ten years systematically re-mapping the United States state-by-state according to his creative imagination.
Now Rodriguez’s 55 imaginative maps — he added the five new states of Disney, Hollywood, Internet, Monopoly and Territory — fill the walls at the Austin Museum of Art through May 17.
Rodriguez’s maps are immediately familiar. Who hasn’t seen similar vividly colored hand-drawn maps in an atlas, on the walls of a school room or held in the lap during a road trip? And Rodriguez has all the expected cartographic components there: the topographical symbols, the road numbers and river names, the border lines, the formal typeface.
But these maps are also deliberately absurd. What if Kansas collided with the Southeast? What if Texas bordered New Jersey? What if every state in America had a port? What if there were new borders, new bodies of water, new mountain ranges?
By re-imagining the entire country, Rodriguez considers the deeper meaning of place in the 21st century. He situates our nation’s capital half-way between the newly imagined states of Hollywood and Monopoly. The names of the towns and cities in Hollywood are taken from the movies; in Monopoly, cities are named after the cites that headquarter Fortune 500 companies.
We long to define ourselves by where we are from, where our families came from or where we choose to live. But in today’s mobile, shifting world, place is more fluid than ever before.
The lacklustre installation at AMOA disappointments and doesn’t do justice to the potency of Rodriguez’s richly imaginative ink drawings.
That’s too bad. Because in his charming, beguiling colorful maps, Rodriguez — who himself has perhaps the ultimate multi-cultural, multi-national background —ask trenchant questions. And perhaps the most important is. how would you map your world?
“Lordy Rodriguez: States of America”
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, (Thursdays until 8 p.m.), noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through May 17
Where: Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress Ave.
Tickets: $4-$5
Information: 495-9224, www.amoa.org
Image: “Monopoly” by Lordy Rodriguez. Courtesy AMOA.
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