Join Dogwood Alliance and SlaytheMic as we collaborate to bring tales of connections to nature and music to you.

This week our hosts Kimala Luna from Dogwood Alliance and Elizabeth Lashay from SlayTheMic talk with artist Allison Maria Rodriguez about her artwork and how she creates immersive experiential spaces to challenge conventional ways of understanding the world.

Be sure to check out Allison’s website here. Her work delves into climate change, species extinction, humanity’s relationship to nature, and the pervasive sense of loss for that which can never be recovered. Here is an example of one of her pieces Wish You Were Here: Greetings from the Galapagos that she refers to in our interview:

You can also read the full transcript of our interview with Allison below.

Listen to the full Woods & Wilds: The Podcast featuring Allison:

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Check out the full transcript of our interview with Allison!

Full Transcript:

Elizabeth Lashay:
Hello everyone. And welcome back to Woods & Wilds Podcast. I’m Elizabeth Lashay. And I’m joined with my wonderful co-host.

Kimala Luna:
I’m Kimala Luna with Dogwood Alliance. And we have the ultimate honor of being here today with Allison Maria Rodriguez, who is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in video installation and new media. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction, and the interconnectivity of existence. Through video performance, digital animation, photography, drawing collage, and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic emotional, and conceptual exploration. She uses art to communicate beyond language, to open up a space of possibility for the viewer to encounter alternative ways of connecting to the emotional realities of others. And we’re so excited to have her here today. We’re going to be talking about her recent projects, Wish You Were Here: Greetings from the Galapagos and In the Presence of Absence. Welcome, Allison. Hello!

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

Kimala Luna:
Thank you.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I want to just hop right on in and I have to say I’m looking at your artwork and all that it is, it’s absolutely stunning. And my first question would be at what age did you feel like, “I have an eye for capturing the essence of beauty?”

Kimala Luna:
Such a good question.

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. I’ve always been a lover of wildlife and the environment since I was a child. But my artistic pursuits, I actually was a literature major in college, and I did not think that I was going to be a visual artist in my future. I happened to take a few photography electives while I was an undergrad, and I just fell in love with the way that I could communicate so much more than I could with all the theory and academic jargon that I was using in my papers with these images. And so I kind of transitioned and did a full like 90° turn and started working in visual art.

Kimala Luna:
Beautiful. I want to talk about the older project, Wish You Were Here: Greetings from the Galapagos. Can you give us just a little bit of a summary about that project?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Absolutely. So that is a three-channel immersive experiential installation, and it’s inspired by a trip that I took to the Galapagos in 2016. And the piece basically thinks about the earth as a brain experiencing climate change as trauma. I try to think about intimate ways to talk about environmental issues, ways that make it relate to the experiences that humans have, so that it sort of approaches it from a slightly different angle. I think, than a lot of the media that folks see about climate change and environmentalism. So for this piece, like I said, it’s a brain experiencing climate changes trauma and species extinction is kind of like PTSD, I think about it in the piece. But basically what happens is there’s a huge landscape where you see different environments and peering on the different screens.

And then you start to see all of these animals from the Galapagos appearing in the main screen. And on the side screens, you start to see these synaptic flashes that signal across each other. So one screen talking to the other one, as these extinct animals start appearing as they disappeared from the earth. And then as the piece moves along, seasons change and things like that. But the animals in the center start to turn into pencil sketches and then they disappear and appear on the opposite sides, right, and left with the extinct species. I’m also a figure in the landscape. I’m in all channels, but I’m kind of doing different sorts of activities and really looking at the animals, but not seeing them in a way. And it’s sort of like a blend between conservation and consumption, I guess.

So like I’m a tourist as well. And when I was there, I was very aware that every step I took was a part of what’s sort of wrong with the natural world. Even though I was on an eco-friendly type of experience, I still was very conscious and very aware of that. So this has attention between those aspects of what I do and what we all do as we try to navigate the world. So I think the piece is somewhat geared towards folks who are environmentally conscious potentially already but deal with that struggle, navigating that space.

Elizabeth Lashay:
Thank you for sharing that because I have to say I’ve really grown to make and intertwine my life story and nature. Because we are intertwined and that’s what I keep learning. So when you talk about this immersion video and experience, where did this come from to decide that you are going to really install and dive deep into an immersion experience?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I think it has to do with what I’m trying to create. I want the person engaging with my work to have an experience. I’m creating a space in which they can hopefully open up to different emotions and sort of allow themselves to just have an emotional experience that stands somewhat outside of how they would go about their routine day-to-day. And I use beauty as a strategy to bring people in, to point out how beautiful everyday reality is. I use magical realism as a way to kind of show some… I make something look more real than real in order to show how fantastical your every day is, I suppose. And it just seemed like that’s what I want is a place in which people can open up to connection and to different ways of thinking. And that it’s not something where I’m trying to teach them a particular lesson or convey a particular kind of information.

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I want people to be interested in conservation and to look up these different animals and learn things. But what I’m really trying to do is open up different ways of thinking about engaging with the world. And I think that, that’s kind of through an experience through connection, not necessarily for me and my skillset, not necessarily through infer technical information.

Kimala Luna:
I love that. And I think we can relate because a large part of what this podcast is about is like showing different avenues to different people’s various connections to nature, because they’re all marvelous. And so I love the idea of using like beauty as a strategy to just convey that feeling. When was it a time that you completed something and you almost convinced like shifted your own mindset with it?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
That’s interesting. I think I did this fellowship in the Arctic in 2018 and I’m making work based on that experience. I was there because I’m an artist. It was part of a fellowship where I came as an artist sort of like embedded in. I followed around scientists that were out doing research and just kind of tagged along with them. And then I was sort of embedded in a citizen scientist group. So I actually did got to have the experience of doing the research myself, but I came to this experience through art and I had what can only be called a spiritual experience to me. Prior to sort of this work, the Galapagos work, the In the Presence of Absence, this Arctic experience. I didn’t really consider myself a spiritual person.

I mean, I grew up Catholic, which is religious and I sort of stepped away from that as I became an adult, but this really opened me up to feeling that interconnection of existence, of the universe, in this really profound way. And to really look at things, but you can’t see. Like a lot of what they were studying in the Arctic were Daphnia, which are these tiny little water fleas and the sort of feel connected to a water flea and was just a very profound experience. And that happened for me through art-making.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I want to talk about the inspiration in terms of like from nature. And when you look at your surroundings, what are some things that you see that stem from what you have experienced growing up?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I guess, empathy, maybe. I feel the pain of extinction. I feel that as a visceral kind of loss, and I think other people would too if they were more aware of it. That it’s not like a lack of ability to have empathy. It’s more of like not feeling that connection. And when I see beauty, it’s also somewhat painful because it has a sense of leading to it as well. And so my work does kind of come from this place of loss and absence and memorial. And there’s hope in it as well.

Kimala Luna:
First of all, it’s so painful that we’re doing a podcast about your art, because your images are just… For anybody tuning in, you should really go to her website. It’s allisonmariarodriguez.com. And look at some of these pieces because they are just like so layered and beautiful. And you do have a parallel between Wish You Were Here: the Galapagos project and In the Presence of Absence where you talk about the cultural loss that happens. So I guess what I want to know about is this reverence that you take in your art, for not only this loss, but like the celebration of it. Like riding that fine balance. I don’t know. Like what is making that connection feel like for you? And what does it feel like when other people can fully comprehend it?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
And this actually is going to tag back into the last question, I think about empathy. And may actually be a better answer to that question. Like In the Presence of Absence was born out of me putting an image of my grandmother on the wall. My deceased grandmother from Cuba alongside of an extinct animal and feeling like there was some kind of connection between those two. And that’s obviously something I saw in childhood, my grandmother, and that experience of loss, to this experience of loss of this other species in the fabric of what makes up our world. And if you can make a parallel between the beauty of a relationship with a human, to the beauty of our relationship with the earth, I think there’s something captivating about that idea.

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
And I’ve had people experience my work in lots of different ways and it’s always incredibly rewarding. Little kids have been captivated. I guess, I shouldn’t use captivated too much. Have been seated like inside my installations and just sitting there and watching. And I’ve had parents come up to me and say, “They never do that.” And children were not really my primary audience when I was creating the work, but I figured things kind of move slow. There isn’t really a traditional sense of narrative and the work kids won’t be interested, but it does grab them. And I think it is something about that line in between where it’s celebration and mourning.

Kimala Luna:
That’s beautiful. That spoke to my question better than I could even ask it.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I think about that childlike thought process, and especially when we’re in a world where it’s quite heavy and we’re navigating racial injustice, a global pandemic. So many different views and narratives of the world and you bring such a light-hearted fantasy into your work. Can you speak about that a little bit, about the fantasy realm of your artwork?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Yeah. A few things, I suppose. I’m kind of tagging back along to what I was saying earlier about magical realism. I think there’s a sense of making something fantastical in order to make it more real. So I think there’s an element of that. And then also I think there is something empowering about fantasy. I think it’s often in our very patriarchal capitalist society designated to this idea of play, but it’s thinking about things differently. It’s imagining new worlds, which is a skill set that we need in order to change the way that we’re living now. So I kind of consider the creative process that happens when we all fantasize as a strategy for change because it is opening up your mind to different ways of being. And that’s what is so hard for so many people and causes sort of us to run up against this existing in the same old routine and way of being.

Kimala Luna:
Yeah. I want to jump deeper into the fantasy aspect of it because I remember a project that I wish I could… I think it’s called something like a girl’s fantasy, but I was originally captivated by your work from this project. Where you tapped back into the fantasies that girls had when they were younger. Like, I think mine was building fairy houses, and that feels very similar to that mourning celebration space. And so can you talk a little bit about that project as well?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Absolutely. That’s the Legends Breathe project and it’s an ongoing project where I interview different female-identified and non-binary creative people about fantasies that they had as children that help them deal with some form of trauma. So it could be seen as escape, but it also is a way of creating oneself, a new in the world. I have them describe the fantasy to me, and it happens in different ways. Like it can happen via email. It can happen via us meeting for coffee. It happens in different ways, but then I visually explore that fantasy. I don’t recreate it because that’s not possible, but it does have this different sort of life of coming from an adult talking about a fantasy that they had as a child. So there’s that level. But then it’s also coming into me and going through my fantasies and my childhood. And I explore them visually.

And I install them in different ways. I created something that was like a structure that mimics sort of like the idea of a tent or fort, that adult-sized people could go sit inside and experience the fantasy around them. And I also created these small boxes that were like treasure chest, that a child might have to put things that are precious and you open them up. And there was a screen at the bottom that would play the video. So I’m also kind of approaching different ways that we express intimacy, I guess. And the relationship of the body and space to those things. And I’m also just interested, I think like when I showed this project for the first time, so many more people were just like, “Even just this is making me happy right now.” Was something that I felt like we needed at that moment.

People were just like smiling and saying, “This is just making me happy in this moment.” And for me that was good. I’ve also just recently finished showing this in a solo show called Subversive Dreams, where it was all large scale projections surrounding a building. So you could see multiple fantasies at once from outside because of the COVID pandemic situation. And that was really cool because they were larger than life. And one was up at the top of the building and they were along the sides and I liked seeing the fantasies in relationship to one another, so that they start a conversation. And you can see what’s unique about each one, but also where the similarities lie. Yeah. I think fantasy is a tool that we need as a society.

Elizabeth Lashay:
Everything that you have done in terms of you and your artwork and the message that you convey, what have been some roadblocks or some difficult times that you have had to overcome?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I think the pandemic itself has been a bit of a… My work doesn’t lend itself to being online. A lot of artists had to kind of pivot and start to find ways to show their work online. And I decided not to do that. I had a few different projects that I’ve been working on. I have an installation going up in New York in January. And I had a project that was supposed to happen this fall. It’s not happening, but I’m still working on the same work in the hopes of having opportunities to show it in an installation sense still, which some have popped up. But not having access to my studio has been really hard. I didn’t have a studio for a long time, but then I have for the past year and a half. And it may be spoiled me a little bit because having that actual space to think and like lay ideas out and move around and be by myself was really valuable.

But I’m adapting and I’m learning and I’m still making work and I’m still showing work because opportunities are coming up and where I’m doing like window installations and things like that. So people don’t necessarily get to be immersed in it, but they get to experience something in physical space. That’s human size. So I think that was something and is something that I’m still sort of struggling with. Just how to navigate that and continue to make work that’s valuable to the world. And also not just trying to react to the pandemic.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I guess, I want to go back to what you described as what can only be described as a spiritual experience and talk to you about are there ways that you tap back into that? Do they involve nature? Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to nature and how it compares to your art?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I mean, I live in Boston, which is a city and I do try to spend as much time as I can in green spaces. But a lot of my experiences with nature I have to travel to have. So I do try to go to different places and have experiences. And I try to allow myself to just have an experience there and to not worry about creating a piece of work while I’m there. I think, it’s important for me to remain open to what I’m experiencing, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing. And I also do a lot of just research and I think that keeps me open.

Elizabeth Lashay:
You had described that spiritual experience and how do you tap back into it and just your personal…

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I mean, I think identifying that as well, that, that’s what this is. This is something spiritual to me. And just then looking at my work, looking at my interests, looking at my research from that lens. I can’t get rid of it now. So yeah, it’s just the part now of how I see my work and my movement in the world. I haven’t had really like trouble tapping back into that because it’s just made me see… It hasn’t really necessarily changed the work that I make drastically, but it’s made me see my own work differently.

Elizabeth Lashay:
Oh, wow. Whenever I look at your work, I see lots of bright colors. I mean, what is the inspiration for the vibrant colors that you incorporate into your artwork?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I mean, I guess talking about magical realism and fantasy and nature, which have bright colors in them. That inspiration I think is really aesthetic and is part of being of my particular artistic process. I see colors together and I love them. I love vibrant colors. I love them in relationship to each other. I love surrounding individuals with color. So I think that’s a very instinctual and impulsive reaction to color for me. So I don’t know how it’s inspired and sure it is, deep down inside me, inspired in particular ways. But it just feels very instinctual and very automatic. Like I see these colors together and to me, they’re beautiful. So they go together. And I love vibrant colors. I’ve always loved color.

Kimala Luna:
This makes me want to know about like young Allison and like, what were you like when you were a child? And did you always love bright colors?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Yeah. I mean, I think I came from a very complicated childhood, which I think is part of how I approach the arts. I do think that there’s a lot of creative people that come from backgrounds of trauma, because you have to think and approach the world differently, just based on your experience of life. There isn’t necessarily a clear trajectory or path that you’ve been given to follow. The rules are not the way that you’ve been told the rules are supposed to be. They’re different. So you sort of have to like be creative, think outside the box and experience a world that’s sort of off narrative. So I think that, that leads itself to creativity. I grew up in Florida and as a child, which nature was always a big part of my childhood. My parents both loved nature for different reasons.

And yeah, I don’t know. I was a very introspective, quiet child. And politically motivated. I mean, I’m sure that my sister also went to Antioch College, which our motto is be ashamed to die until you’ve won some victory for humanity. Very politically driven. I became very politically driven. And part of that also was that my family relocated to West Virginia, which was very racist, very homophobic. And I had to deal with those kinds of experiences as well, every day for many years. And I think that, that lended itself to me thinking differently because I wasn’t necessarily allowed inside the dominant narrative. And also to me wanting to change things.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I’m so excited to see what you’re doing and what is ongoing. I also want to know what are you doing for yourself? Because I see and I can interpret and view your artwork. And I want to go and be immersed, but is that something that is really your passion still. Because sometimes artwork then turns into providing for others instead of providing for self. So do you still feel self-fulfilled?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
No. That’s a really good question. And my answer to that is that if I don’t make work. Like I’ve been asked, “How do you have hope? How do you continue to make work in spite of like all these statistics? In spite of all these people who don’t believe in climate change? In spite of etc?” And my response is to make art in a way in the most selfish way. It’s my way of navigating the world and my way of living. If I’m not making art, I start to get sad. That’s just who I am. I mean, there are moments in my life where art is not what I’m doing at that moment. And that’s okay because life has its ebbs and flows, but in general I’m a maker and it’s how I process. So in a way it’s not really even about fulfillment. It’s about survival, I guess.

Kimala Luna:
Yeah. That lines up perfectly with my next question, because you had mentioned earlier about creativity being a response to trauma. And we are now living through a collective trauma. And I think that art as a form of healing is such a beautiful thing, but I think it’s often really hard for people to just begin. So if you had any advice that you wanted to give people who were maybe needing to process feeling creative, but not knowing how to start, what would you do?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Now, that’s a very good question. I tell people to make their definition of art more lax. I think that being an artist is not necessarily creating a particular work of art. It’s about living creatively in the world. And I think if you open up your definition of what art is, and you can see the actions that you do in life as creative acts, it can lead you to being more consciously creative, if that makes sense. It’s a very narrow definition, I think, depending on who you ask of what art is. And I’ve always as an educator, as a curator, as an artist, of course, felt like that is too narrow. I mean, it’s about life. It’s about experience. It’s about engaging with the world, with your surroundings, with yourself. So broadening that definition and not holding yourself to a particular standard, I think can open you up to possibilities.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I know that Kimala was asking about young Allison and I am also curious of like that moment. If there’s a story or a moment in time, when you remember nature, just really fueling who you are. Anything you like to share.

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
I mean, I don’t have a particular moment that I can pinpoint until I became an adult, but I mean, when I was a little child, I wanted to be a marine biologist. And one of the things that I did that I was very proud of was that I’d walk around, asking adults to quiz me about sharks. So I’ve just always been fascinated with nature. I’ve always loved animals. I’ve always loved watching nature films, going to the Everglades, looking at pictures and books. I’ve always loved drawings of animals and scientific drawings of animals as well as creative drawings of animals. So it’s just a part of who I am. I think, as I’ve become older and moved through different stages of life, I’ve recognized the spiritual connection there. And that has happened in particular moments. But yeah, it’s just kind of how I understand myself in the world.

Kimala Luna:
So you mentioned that you and your sister both went to Antioch College. And I’m a little curious about this college because it sounds like it was really trying to encourage people to become revolutionaries. And so can you just talk a little bit about your experience there?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
That’s definitely true. It was a very political school. The first year I was there, Mia Boone Jamal was the graduation speaker while he was on death row. And like, there’s one of the slogans to his bootcamp for the revolution. It’s about thinking outside the box. It valued being a citizen in the world, being an engaged person with the world. It encouraged, outward-looking and outward thinking. There was a lot of community meetings, but yeah, it just sort of… It was a little bit of a bubble in Yellow Springs, Ohio. But I’ve noticed as an adult, it did cultivate this way of engaging with other people, that a lot of folks who went to big universities, but didn’t sort of have this particular way of looking at things don’t have those same skill sets or those same ways of approaching situations.

Like everything is modeled around thinking about yourself as in relationship to the world, to everything out, going on in the world. It’s the bigger picture, I guess.

Elizabeth Lashay:
If you had a magic wand, what would you change in this moment in time in regards to what we’re seeing environmentally?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Oh, wow. I think, I really would go down to what my work is trying to do. I think that as a whole, we have this very colonial relationship to nature. This is very much a take relationship. And I would change that. I would make it so that we see ourselves as a part of it, of nature. And that both of us are dependent on each other, not as humans existing outside and dominating nature. I think that’s simply what I would change. And I think if you change that, a lot of other things would change. If folks valued the natural world as a part of who they are and how they understand their identity, the way it’s treated will change. If you felt like harming the earth was harming yourself and your family, that relationship is different than the colonial relationship we have to nature.

Elizabeth Lashay:
It’s so powerful.

Kimala Luna:
Well, Allison, what’s on the horizon? Where can people see your stuff, follow you?

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Well, I’m on Instagram and I’m just Allison Maria Rodriguez on Instagram. And I love connecting with people. So please feel free to follow me and send me a message. I’ll follow you. I love connecting with people. You can see my work on my website, which is allisonmariarodriguez.com. And I have an installation up in Ohio right now. I’m going to have an installation in Boston in December, and I’m going to have an installation in New York in January. So I’m still out in the world and exhibiting, but I think the best way to follow what I’m doing is to go to my website and look at my news page and to follow me on Instagram.

Elizabeth Lashay:
I am just so excited to at least have this time to sit down with you and experience and get to know you a little bit better. So thank you so much for allowing us to talk with you today, speak with you.

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Thank you so much for having me on here. I’m very grateful that you were interested in my work and what I’m doing and the kind of way I’m trying to engage and change a little bit of the world. So thank you both so much.

Elizabeth Lashay:
Thank you so much for all the beautiful work you’re doing. I’m super inspired by it. And so happy that you were able to make time for us today. This was wonderful.

Kimala Luna:
Yeah.

Allison Maria Rodriguez:
Thank you both.