An electric future // Art exhibit – Artworks by S Rodriguez @ East Lubbock Art House

S Rodriguez is a Texas based interdisciplinary artist. S’s practice is grounded in their own experience of growing up southern, texmex, and trans. Drawing on non-canonical queer histories and futures, their work implements sci-fi strategies as a way of imagining and co-creating new ways to structure and de-structure the world. S Rodriguez questions how structures such as species, gender, race, and language, function both as liberatory technology and oppressive power structure in our current time, and beyond. Just as one can upgrade or change software once a technology is obsolete, one can negotiate the purpose of any framework, and cause a paradigm shift.

This exhibition will focus on a speculative future, in which language has evolved past tongues, and humans, flower, and fauna, live in a symbiotic relationship against those whose greed threatens to destroy the earth. ‘Rhizome’, a recorded video that narrativises this idea, will be one of the featured pieces. In it, the artist uses the electricity present in all living things, to speak (metaphorically) to the audience. Each plant is wired to a chip attached to a computer that reads each closed circuit, here, each time the artist touches one of the plants, as a pre-recorded sound file. The voices of the plants tell the story of the future earth, over and over until the voices are an unrecognizable cacophony.

Each other piece in the exhibition will expand upon this universe, using text, foliage, sound, propaganda-like flyering and abstract symbols to reveal the ‘history’ that has taken place in our future timeline. All beings that live, live now, and will live in the future.