Kathy Rodriguez

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Artist Statement

My newest work reflects ideas of potential and healing through the process of creating voids and geometric shapes in meditative fields. I began this series after teaching in Rome with the University of New Orleans’ International Studies program in July 2018.  The deceptive simplicity of circles and squares in this work refer to the classical geometry that permeates the artwork in the city. Near the end of the trip, there was a blood moon, a lunar eclipse that lasted the longest of any of any in the twenty-first century. Eclipses mark beginnings, times for starting anew.  A new beginning, however, will always be tied to what came before it, and it is this shifting relationship that the work engages by evoking the potential of change. The work in painting replaces the void with a more literal moon, still evoking cycles and change with the addition of lunar magic.
 
The typewriter drawings speak to me about an inability to communicate, about redaction, and about the whirling  thoughts that intrude upon meditative space.  I am interested in the idea of the print and easily disseminated information contrasted with the reality of language barriers and isolation that verges on the unhealthy.  
 
I have also utilized the metaphor of food to convey thoughts and messages about consumption, nourishment (or the lack thereof), the culture of food in New Orleans, and how that culture of food relates to communication.
 
Biography

Kathy Rodriguez is a native of Metairie, Louisiana. She lived in Metairie and New Orleans before and after a brief 1998 stint in art school in Baltimore. Between 1999 and 2004, she completed the curriculum for a Bachelor's degree in Arts, with a focus in Studio Art, at The University of New Orleans. In August 2005, she moved to Missoula, Montana, to concurrently earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing with a Master of Arts degree in Art History in the  graduate program in Fine Arts at The University of Montana, Missoula. These were conferred in May of 2008. Since then, she has worked at a variety of local institutions and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, School of the Arts, at The University of New Orleans, teaching a variety of painting, drawing, design, and art history courses.