Carissa RodriguezBusque el GhostJanuaryJan 17th - FebruaryFeb 27th, 2010Gaga Mexico City

The paper you hold bears this text much like woven fabric bears its pattern. The manner of the words’ entanglement with its support governs the order and uses of its two sides, contributing to the exhibition’s legibility. Textile, too, organizes a particular relation between its two sides. Its interlocking pattern of individual threads simultaneously produces front and back and their relation. CR frequently brings these relations into focus by presenting the often hidden limits that delineate inside and out, or define a surface and its inversion. Through various modes of reproduction, CR captures and displays these interrelations, showing the asymmetry between a material and its translation as image – a kind of trespassing upon the object’s autonomy and within the artifice of the material’s plan or scheme. In Chantilly 01–06, CR’s inkjet prints on self-adhesive vinyl, the weave of lace is seen transposing itself as a net escaping the architectural plan of its square borders. The image highlights its own woven materiality and thus the process of labor that converts raw material into luxury commodities.

In another action analogous to the process of textile production, CR has transplanted the canvas billboard that hung outside the gallery into the gallery itself and has coated it with a paint that makes surfaces adaptable as projection screens. With this displacement, Screen (Distant Star) moves from being a support which ‘holds a text’ to one which now ‘captures a image’. Freeing the sign from its commercial utility and from a particular fixed relation to its site, CR recaptures the static sign as a mobile blank screen for the motion picture.

Jason Loebs, NYC, 1/17/10

GAGA is pleased to present Carissa Rodriguez’s first solo show in Mexico– Busque el Ghost. The exhibition is the second installment of a larger, ongoing project whose inception Cherchez La Ghost was Rodriguez’s 2009 solo show at New Jerseyy in Basel, Switzerland. The directive literally translates, “Look for the phantom”, as formally and contextually invoked by the artworks themselves. In Busque el Ghost Rodriguez dramatizes the physical and narrative space of the sign in relation to the function and symbolic register of the screen , which simultaneously acts here as a separation– a partitioning device in the gallery space, as well as the viewing surface and support structure for the minor moving-image spectacle. A celebrated brand-name restaurant is evoked in the work. As they say in Mexico City, ¿Como quiere su sashimi, corte fino o corte grueso? (Would you prefer your sashimi thick, or thin?) Rodriguez uses ‘projection’ not only as the casting of cinematic light, but as a retroreflective gaze on the enjoyment and terror of distinction. Tataki de Atún con Tosazu– the taste of reflection and the luminous flux of taste.

Rodriguez’s work is currently on view at Kunsthalle Zurich in Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show through January 31, 2010. The body of work engages relationships between painting, textile and digital imaging with a parallel text by the artist. Selected forthcoming exhibitions include The Swiss Institute, NY and Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, both in Spring 2010.

Carissa Rodriguez is an artist, writer and gallerist born in New York City where she currently lives and works. Upon receiving a degree in Literature at the New School for Social Research in 1994, her first exhibition was in 1996 at American Fine Arts, NY – 100 Photographs curated by Colin De Land. Her 1998 breakthrough project The Stand with designer Jodi Busby went on to exhibitions at P.S. 1 Museum, NY; The Swiss Institute, NY; and American Fine Arts, NY in 1999, The Royal College of Art, London; Gastatelier Fleetinsel, Hamburg; and TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam in 2000, and KW Kunst-Werke, Berlin in 2004. Her first solo exhibition was at Forde, Geneva in 2000. From 2001-2002, Rodriguez was awarded a grant from the Van Lier Fellowship to attend the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. The year 2004 marked her last official art exhibition in New York at Greene Naftali Gallery and her entry into the gallery world as an art dealer at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY where she is currently Director in collaboration with Emily Sundblad and John Kelsey. As Reena Spaulings–the artist, Rodriguez collaborated on Reena Spaulings’ solo-exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel in 2008 – Courbet Your Enthusiasm. While continuing her role as gallerist at RSFA, in 2009 Rodriguez began to actively exhibit again at venues such as Gavin Brown Enterpirse, NY; X Initiative, NY, among others.