![]() Rodríguez studied mechanical engineering in Mexico City before moving to London to pursue a Master’s degree in Art History. He grew up speaking Náhuatl, one of the most widely-spoken Uto-Aztecan languages in Mexico, and came of age during the Zapatista movement of the 1980s and 1990s fighting for indigenous rights and land reform. Image courtesy of the artist and and Gaga, Mexico City and Los Angeles.įernando Palma Rodríguez was born in 1957 in Milpa Alta, a small agricultural community Southeast of Mexico City founded by Aztec families. Beneath his charmingly low-fi renditions of tiny worlds and Aztec deities are the backdrops of colonialism, displacement, and cultural erasure.įernando Palma Rodriguez. ![]() Most of the time, Palma Rodríguez is an activist and an engineer before he is an artist. In “Tlalticpactli,” the only painting in the exhibition, electronic circuits and electroluminescent sheets power the rhythmic, Bruce Nauman-like illumination of delicate chairs suspended on a floating block of earth, a visual poem that is melancholic, meditative, and fretful all at once. Its spasmic outbursts contrast with the stoic hand gestures of the figure that looms above it like a Christ, “Coyote Inalienable,” one of the series of cardboard-headed coyote sculptures found throughout the exhibition. The pit bull cyborg is actually titled “Nanahuatzin” for the Aztec sun god and consists of a sewing machine attached to an outstretched leather glove on one end and the red-and-yellow mask of the Mexican wrestler, El Solar, on the other. The motion sensor-activated robot is the work of Fernando Palma Rodríguez, a Mexican artist making his museum debut in the United States with a two-decade survey of robotic sculptures, titled “In Ixtli in Yollotl, We the People.”įernando Palma Rodriguez. Exhausted, the creature lays motionless for a few moments, then launches into its next fit of erratic movements seconds later. In the middle of MoMA PS1’s ground floor exhibition space, a pit bull-sized robot thrashes and jerks uncontrollably.
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