Carissa Rodriguez at Kunstverein München

Artist: Carissa Rodriguez

Exhibition title: Imitation of Life

Venue: Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany

Date: May 4 – August 18, 2024

Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and © Kunstverein München

With Imitation of Life, Kunstverein München presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Europe by Carissa Rodriguez. The exhibition centers on a new video work created during the first year in the life of the artist’s first child and opens soon after the baby turns one. The production timeline for the artist coincides with the period known as ‘primary maternal preoccupation’—a mindset of psychic interdependence between mother and child.

The durational video, which bears the same title as the exhibition, enacts ‘reverie’—the experience of being lost in thought. Filmed exclusively during the hour between 6am to 7am, or the break of dawn, it is not the sunrise that is recorded, but its reflection in the phallic mirror: a nearby skyscraper seen from the window of the baby’s room in the artist’s apartment. By framing a natural occurrence (sunrise), a landscape (Manhattan skyline), a chosen hour (before the workday begins), and an intrapsychic state (‘matrescence’), the video occupies a liminal space between interior and exterior, conscious and unconscious and embodies the inherent contradiction between daydreaming and productive labor. In this framework, ‘free time’ is rendered paradoxical through the artist’s effort to translate life into art. Modes of reflexivity and ‘mirroring’ (mental, physical, metaphorical) run throughout Rodriguez’s exhibition while the reverie engages the often-conflicting temporal demands of exhibition-making and caregiving. Drone cinematography, ubiquitous in modern warfare, is tested as a medium to convey tenderness and intimacy. The video is transmitted electronically to an LED wall. The use of commercial display that emits light, in favor of a movie screen that absorbs light, corresponds with the digital source material and reexamines what it means ‘to project’.

Imitation of Life also features two off-site projects in the vicinity of the Kunstverein München, one at a local primary school and the other at Munich’s seminal arthouse cinema Theatiner Filmkunst. In her exhibition, Rodriguez connects three distinct institutions of self-cultivation: the museum, the school, and the cinema. In this framework, the new video of the same name sets loose a chain of questions without clear answers. A poignant one that keeps returning is whether the mirror has the capacity, the desire, or perhaps the conscience to return the gaze. For the child, it is precisely this maternal presence and reciprocity that constitutes her sense of self, her whole world.