Lymarie Rodriguez

On a blurry boundary between abstraction and surrealism, photographer Lymarie Rodriguez’s impossibly crisp images on metallic paper simultaneously portray miniature still lives and dynamic epics. The Puerto Rican artist’s preferred subjects are tiny crystal balls designed to water plants. Removing these brilliant, shimmering and ethereal globes from their utilitarian context and making them muses and models, Rodriguez continues the project of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, though she doesn’t dwell on such self-reflexive specifics. Her projects seem much grander, despite their minute scale.

Against backdrops so out of focus they become abstract color walls, Rodriguez portrays these moist crystal orbs on water, ice, glass and mirrors. In these surroundings, shapes and objects melt into a play of surfaces, reflections and light. Brilliantly rendered in all their translucence, these shining textures devoid of tangible interiors question the very nature of matter. In her miniature plays of shapes and shells, Rodriguez questions weighty assumptions about fullness, embodiment and the act of looking itself.