Lordy Rodriguez: Maybe These Maps and Legends Have Been Misunderstood

In his comprehensive exhibition "States of America," now on display at the Austin Museum of Art, Lordy Rodriguez has it all mapped out. What it is, is this country of ours, albeit a version that the artist has rendered fantastically, subjectively, using the sort of cartography he's evolved from road maps: the bright color-coding, the labels of graduated weight reflecting size or influence, lines of demarcation sanctifying political boundaries, other lines charting the myriad routes of transportation. These maps are enormous, strictured and structured swaths of text-bedecked hues, representing 55 states – because Rodriguez also includes the states of Disney, Hollywood, Internet, Monopoly, and Territory – and they're the culmination of a decade's worth of work.

"It started off with me driving back and forth between Houston and New York when I was in undergraduate school," says the disarmingly young (33) artist whose family moved to the U.S. from the Philippines when he was 3 years old. "Back then, the work I was doing was closer to Damien Hirst or Francis Bacon type of work – totally different and mostly sculptures, like Hirst's shark-in-the-tank kind of work. But I was in school, and I didn't have any money, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll start drawing,' because sculptures are too expensive, and I've always been good at drawing.

"And I was driving back and forth across the country, which I did every semester, but the only way I could really relate to the landscape was by looking at the map. And I was feeling so homesick for Houston, through almost all four years of school, that I'd just look back, when I was in New York, just look at the map of Houston – where I'd lived, where I went to high school. And it all just kind of connected to me. Later on, thinking about it, it made so much sense. Because mapping is probably the oldest visual language there is. Not the traditional methods but, like, just a line with a circle on it, meaning, 'the path to the lake.' After realizing that and combining it with the sense of nostalgia I had with the landscape, I found that maps have such a great potential for any kind of discourse. You could talk about anything and relate it to a map somehow."

In "States of America," the artist talks about a lot of things, moving the discourse smoothly, one map to the next, from the effects of multinational corporations on local areas to the influence of a Hollywood-amplified imagination on the borders between what is and what might be. You might be a bit jarred to find, in Rodriguez's map of Texas, the Davy Crockett National Forest next to the Catskill Mountains and the Gulf of Maine defining the northwestern border of our great republic, but after a while and a few more of these cartographic chimeras, it all begins to make a sort of Lordy-visual sense.

"Visual" is a key word here, as, for all the show's discursive power, the words on these maps could be expressed in some language you don't understand, and you'd still be awed: by the impact of the colors, the technical precision with which this fabulist's cartography is inscribed, the idea of the hours and hours gone into each depiction of territories revealed as only Rodriguez the traveler can. These are maps of a country that bears repeated exploring.

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"Lordy Rodriguez: States of America" runs through May 17 at the Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, 823 Congress. For more information, call 495-9224 or visit www.amoa.org.