Martín Rodríguez

As a transmission and sound artist, Martín Rodríguez’s work emerges from his Chicanx upbringing along the Arizona-Mexico border. He employs performance, intervention, and installation as a process for deciphering aural histories and entangled identities.

After recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor, a chance encounter with a radio transmission caught in the pickup coils of his guitar reoriented Rodríguez. Developing his practice from crisis, he examines radio as a transformative medium. Rooting his relationship with radio in healing, his artworks consider transmission as a material through which sound intertwines with affect, acting as a vessel for ulterior forms of communication.

Elements of care and speculative thinking create rhizomes throughout his artwork. Utilizing these broader methods, Rodriguez approaches his work from the Chicanx concept of rasquachismo; this type of methodology utilizes pragmatic ways of remaking and hacking material and objects to reimagine their function. This is a process born from adapting, merging, and creating something practical and new from very little.

Notably, his work has been presented by the Musée d’art contemporain Montréal (CA), Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MX), Darling Foundry (CA), Walking Festival for Sound (UK/PL), Spektrum (DE), as well as various festivals and performance venues across Canada, and the US.

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Martín Rodríguez. Photo by document original

Martín Rodríguez. Aural Histories (2022)