Issay Rodriguez’s practice is an amalgamation of all the influences she has accumulated and experienced as a co-producing laborer and collaborator. She works towards developing modes of articulation that uses strategies of chance, accuracy and reconfiguration. She employs a collage of techniques to convey a fusion of identities, places and memories. The possible narratives are derived from converging and diverging processes, spaces, materials, contexts and situations. Currently shifting her focus to a more research-oriented and community-based approach using digital media and photography as the most viable, accessible, democratic and widely used medium of the contemporary generation, Rodriguez thinks about image and object-making to counter alienation caused by daily dose of technology that envelopes post-modern life. In her process, she reflects many layers and approaches to exploring the concept of nostalgia through the use of the internet and other technologies made available today. Without verisimilitude as the main goal, she explores on ways to combine them with timeless but classical laborious modes of production in the field of Fine Arts like technical drawing & painting and tactile/sensory, sometimes participatory, art projects in this age of fascination for the fast, instant but distressing world of optical pleasure. Rodriguez obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines, Diliman and was awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award and ”Gawad Tanglaw” in 2013. She also studied as an exchange scholar at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris under the auspices of the French Government where she took short courses on Fresco and Wood carving for their classical oldworld charm. She has exhibited her works in Venice, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Taipei, Manila, New Delhi, Dubai and Paris. She has also been recently selected to participate in the exhibition Viva Arte Viva to be held at the Central Pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennale this year.
