Miami Design District Unveils Larger Than Life Installation by Cristina Lei Rodriguez
Miami based artist Cristina Lei Rodriguez has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for the Sweetbird Building located in the Miami Design District. The installation consists of five large scale prints on the 2nd floor windows of the wooden clad building. Rodriguez’s art questions what is truly natural in today’s urban world. Additionally, her work is a hybrid of natural and artificial materials and ideas.
The images for Digitizing the Phenomena of Nature (Orchids at Sunrise), were created by making compositions of real exotic orchids and local plants from her family garden on top of her scanner bed, which were scanned with the changing light at sunrise. The high-resolution scan captures the plants and the actual sunlight read by the scanner in the moment, creating abstraction and digital interruptions in the images. Living in this moment of tension between the digital and real world, the artist was inspired to try to digitally capture the ever-changing phenomena of nature in an image.
ABOUT CRISTINA LEI RODRIGUEZ
Cristina Lei Rodriguez (1974) received her BA from Middlebury College in 1996, and MFA from California College of Art in 2002. The objects Rodriguez creates take many forms, but all are made from common materials that are given a new intangible life. Her work is organic and minimalist, yet pristinely finished; echoing a tension between the natural and the artificial. Her art has been exhibited internationally and nationally at museums, institutions and galleries such as the Serpentine Gallery (London), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris, Miami), Team Gallery and Deitch Projects (both New York). Rodriguez’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Perez Art Museum Miami, The Bass (Miami), Boca Raton Museum of Art, NSU Museum Ft. Lauderdale, and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum (Miami).
In 2018, the artist published her first monograph “Act Natural: A Retrospective of Work 2003- 2018” with TRA Publishing. Rodriguez has also completed several permanent public artworks in Florida and is currently working on a large-scale tile mural for Art in Public Places Miami. Her work has been reviewed by Modern Painters, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wallpaper, The New Yorker and Arte al Día International.