Debris hanging on the walls acts as a canvas for paintings and embroideries; in the middle of the room there is a rustic, red bed frame.
The pieces reflect the values and meanings of items in a home, as well as how a house communicates status.
Cal State Long Beach MFA student, Sheila Garrett Rodriguez is showcasing her exhibit “Were We Even Here” in the Gatov rooms of the student art galleries.
Though Rodriguez has lived in Southern California her whole life, says she’s moved over 30 times, making a “home” in many new locations. She started at CSULB in 2011 after being a stay-at-home mom for years, saying this has influenced all her art to be based on the idea of the house.
“[It] is thinking about that identity in your home that kind of defines who you are in some ways, people make judgements based on that, but that doesn’t really define you – or does it?” Rodriguez said. “That’s the question I’m asking in this work.”
The exhibit is part of Rodriguez’s thesis project for her MFA in fiber arts.
“It’s a small little department here,” Rodriguez said. “But it’s really coming of age with big shows happening in L.A. with fibers.”
She originally got her BFA from CSULB in drawing and painting. But, with years of embroidering experience from her grandmother’s lessons, she was excited to found out she could transfer easily into the MFA fibers program.
“[Fiber was] a whole new world, and it was wonderful,” Rodriguez said. “But for my MFA I wanted to combine the two, so working through that and trying to resolve that was interesting because they don’t usually go together.”
The piece that really draws the eye is a large oil painting titled “No Trespassing, Borders and Bodies.” It is a self portrait scaled to Rodriguez’s exact measurements, but instead of a head, there is a house; the first house her and her husband ever purchased.
“So there’s a lot of layers in that. Our space, our personal space, is home within — or is it an exterior thing?” Rodriguez said. “I’ve kind of worked toward remembering, repiecing back together my cultural history. I’m really digging into why I do some of the things I do; why we are who we are.”
She was able to include some of her Chicana cultural history by incorporating the embroidery patterns her grandmother taught her in the painting.
“Usually you don’t stitch through your oil painting,” Rodriguez said. “It was difficult after painting it, and then starting, it took me a solid week to just go for it… So that piece was a little emotional in some ways.”
She’s included Mexican-style embroidery of colorful flowers in pieces all over the room, but instead of a canvas she used parts of demolished houses, which she said would’ve just ended up in a dumpster and are now hanging in an art gallery.
“I’m repurposing [the rubble] and I think about the lives that were there once,” Rodriguez said.
In the center of the wide space is an old, wooden bed frame. She removed the frame from her grandmother’s house after her passing. Then, after learning that Good Will no longer accepts bed frames, she was left with it and all the memories attached to it.
“Going through objects and realizing that they have this relationship also had me thinking about how we are connected not only to each other but to space and to objects within the house,” Rodriguez said.
She was able to once again tie her culture by dying the frame red with cochineal scales. Cochineal is an aphid-like bug that attacks cactuses, and their dried scales make a natural red dye when ground.
“Back in colonial times, they came and saw this red dye they were using — the natives; the Mayans — and they were like, ‘What is that technology?’” Rodriguez said. “Prior to that you couldn’t get that red, and it’s also the red used in the American flag.”
Rodriguez said the dye was not just relevant hundreds of years ago, but is still being used today.
“The red synthetic dyes we found are cancerous,” Rodriguez said. “So, the Starbucks strawberries and cream [frappucinos] used to have cochineal as their red, so you were drinking bugs and you didn’t know it.”
But, the question still remains: What is home? What kind of effects do objects have on our lives? There is no better place to ponder on this than Rodriguez’s exhibit “Were We Even Here.” The exhibit is open until 5 p.m. every day through Thursday at the student art galleries.