RAIR | 2020-21

Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado | BAYAMÓN, PUERTO RICO

Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado is an assemblagist sculptor born in Bayamon, PR. He received his BFA from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico (2008) and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2014). His work has been exhibited at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; and The Gallery of the University of Sagrado Corazón, San Juan, PR. He is the recipient of of the Le Roy Neiman Foundation Fellowship, Chicago, IL; Lexus Scholarship, Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR; Oriental Group Fellowship, Caguas, PR; and the Award for the Distinguished Development in Sculpture, Randy Barceló Foundation, San Juan, PR.

I
It was around the late 1980’s, definitely before 1989 that my father hung a poster of the Space Shuttle on one of my bedroom walls. The upper half of the poster displayed the recently minted spacecraft from a below perspective and on top of its tracked carrier. The lower half read:“ ALL SYSTEMS: GO.” The Shuttle was illuminated from below in a theatrical manner and in much the same way the hand-carved wooden statue of Saint Michael Archangel was displayed in one of the niches of my town’s parish. At the time my seven-year-old mind constantly drew associations between the two entities: between the angel’s wings and the Shuttle’s delta platform, between the halo and rocket-booster nozzles.

II
I am concerned with the overlap between the technological landscape and built/imaginary environments. Through my experimental-sculpture based practice, I assume the role of artist-inventor who produces objects of an improvised nature. I am interested in the way these objects can be deployed as the framework of speculative cultural identities and future belief systems.

I believe that one of the great challenges of the coming decades will be to find ways of overcoming the crystallized/hermetic ecology of industrial processes and designed obsolescence, in an effort to create means for the research and development of technological objects as articulations of emotional and psychological dimensions.

www.manolorodriguez.org

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition • Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado “SpaceJammer” • October 13 - December 18, 2020

A SpaceJammer is a moving object set forward by an external impelling force. This force often consists of only human will. S/J’s gather and contain physical fragments and memories of traversed territories and stubbornly deploys them in different ones. Like the blur seen from the inside of a moving car window, they are able to re-render environments, disrupt boundaries and compress space. S/J’s operate most efficiently in the threshold where place and speculative thoughts combine. S/J’s are also a principle of classification and the only concept to most strongly embody autonomy other than autonomy itself.

Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado’s work is concerned with the overlap between the technological landscape and built imaginary environments. Through his experimental sculpture-based practice he assumes the role of an artist-inventor who produces objects of an improvised nature. Rodríguez-Delgado’s work investigates the ways these objects can be deployed as frameworks for speculative cultural identities and belief systems, and how they behave (or could behave) as units of cultural production.

Manuel A. Rodríguez-Delgado was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. The son of a master woodworker, he was exposed at an early age to the Catholic saint carving traditions of the island. He obtained his BFA at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in San Juan, PR. In 2011 he was the recipient of the two main artist awards offered in Puerto Rico: the Lexus Grant for Artists and the Oriental Bank Group prize for an emerging artists. These awards enabled him to pursue his MFA degree in sculpture at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. As an MFA candidate he was the recipient of the Le Roy Nieman Foundation Fellowship. Rodríguez’s work has been shown in numerous venues, most notably the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago; The Gallery of the University of Sagrado Corazón, San Juan; and B_Space, Los Angeles.

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