McLennon Pen Co. Gallery is delighted to announce its first presentation with the New York-based artist Audrey Rodriguez, titled Tastes of Home.
Rodriguez grew up in Port Isabel, Texas, and draws inspiration from her Honduran and Mexican heritage. Tastes of Home showcases paintings of street scenes capturing interactions with Latin American street food vendors and poignant still lifes of the beloved dishes they create. The exhibition includes oil paintings on linen and panel, graphite drawings, and one sculpture.
Turning attention to everyday scenes you may see entering a New York subway station, the paintings Corona Plaza and Feed the Hustle center on the hard-working Latin American food providers working in the streets and shed light on their inventive entrepreneurial techniques like balancing makeshift kitchenettes on carts and using chopsticks as skewers. Viewers of these works are transported to the bustling, snowy, post-pandemic world of a multicultural metropolis, where they become immersed in the sights, smells, and tastes of the city.
With inspiration drawn from historic Dutch Golden Age and Spanish Baroque still life paintings, Rodriguez studies with a closer look these traditional snacks and produce items such as churros, chicharrones, conchas, nopales, mangos, and bananas. Rodriguez paints her still lifes in a highly sophisticated style, where familiar foods and their wrappings are enveloped in natural light and fashioned in positions to be elevated and adored.
The painting Snowy Day and Tropical Fruit depicts bananas, mangos, and limes placed in the unexpected environment of a snowy firescape. The presence of the manufacturer’s stickers still left on the bananas hint to the supply chain and place of origin. Another piece titled Made Sterile depicts bananas and a medical model of a female pelvis, pointing to questions about the pesticides used to grow the fruit and their detrimental effects on farm laborers.
Rodriguez describes her use of these tradable fruits in her paintings as oftentimes a metaphor and poses a question about migration saying “everyone seems happy to take the tropical fruit, but maybe not the people?”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Audrey Rodriguez, born in 1990 in Texas, USA, is currently in residence as a recipient of the New York Academy of Art Chubb Fellowship. She completed her master’s degree at the New York Academy of Art in 2022. Rodriguez’s painting titled Corona Plaza is currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York until September 17, 2023, in the exhibition Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at art institutions such as the John F. Peto Museum in the Peto Biennial and at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art in the 47th International Art Show.