Carissa Rodriguez

Selected works on view from Carissa Rodriguez's recent exhibition at The Wattis Institute, San Francisco.

As an artist based in New York City and temporary guest to the West Coast, Rodriguez follows a personal line of inquiry into everyday life in the Bay Area as it is purportedly being reorganized around the interests of technology industries and their constituents. Confronted by this distinct contemporary habitus — its lifestyles, tastes, and values — Rodriguez produces a body of photographic work in which relationships between images raise questions about "creative life" as it plays out publicly and privately.

Rodriguez's work is often context-specific and not driven by any defining material in its aim to produce "the corollary opposite of the signature object". Through a series of displacements between image, site, and context, the exhibition takes specific design proposals into account in order to ask: what makes life succulent?