The Land of Promise

We are pleased to announce the opening of Monica Rodriguez’ “The Land of Promise”, a new project commissioned by Prospect Art, presented in partnership with Winslow Garage.

Show will run from August 6 to September 10, 2023.

Opening Reception Sunday, August 6, 2023 5 - 8 PM

Winslow Garage 3540 Winslow Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90026

In The Land of Promise, Monica Rodriguez presents a series of drawings that reconsider the Spanish conquest of what would become California. Mixing cartographic land surveys and botanic plant studies, the artist teases out the ruling abstractions at work within the sixteenth and seventeenth century “civilizing” projects to map land, plants and people. In the juxtaposition between the cartographic and the taxonomical, a narrower definition of mapping is destabilized, while the colonial and imperial legacies are made legible in the ongoing language of neutral scientific objectivity. Mapping marks the first step in the command and domination over space. Today the Iberian Empire is gone, Alta California is now Angle California, and yet the disciplines of science are no less formed by the demands of empire and capital.

Los Angeles-based Puerto Rican artist Monica Rodriguez's (b.1980) art practice looks at the history and impact of Colonialism on the political, economic, and social conditions in the Americas and the Caribbean region. Rodriguez obtained an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2011 and was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 2012-13. Rodriguez has exhibited her work internationally, group exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis (2022), TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz, Spain (2021); Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA (2020); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR (2019); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (2019); LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, IL (2018); 19th Contemporary Art Festival Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2015); among others. 

Winslow Garage is an artist-run project space in Silverlake exhibiting local and international contemporary art. Learn more about the space here: https://www.winslowgarage.com/about.html