New York-based artist Carissa Rodriguez will present two of her films, “The Maid” (2018) and “The Girls” (1997/2018), which have been shown across the US and abroad. These works are framed by a short story, by Swiss writer Robert Walser, tracking a caregiver’s 20-year search for a charge who got lost under her watch. Rodriguez’s own “Maid” follows six embryo-like Newborn (1993) sculptures by Sherrie Levine — themselves casts of a modernist 1915 work by Constantin Brancusi. The Newborns reside in collectors’ homes on the Upper East Side and in Hollywood Hills, a museum storage facility in Los Angeles, and at Christie’s auction house. “The Girls” meanwhile returns to footage of Rodriguez’s Chinatown neighborhood in the 1990s, lingering on the image of young girls at play. Channeling Walser’s exquisite compression of twenty years into a single paragraph, Rodriguez’s films similarly suggest the asynchronous and capacious timescale of works of art. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist about time and the slippage between biological, social, and artistic forms of reproduction. 

Carissa Rodriguez (US, born 1970 in New York City) lives and works in New York City. Her solo exhibition The Maid has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago (2020), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019), Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (2019), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2018), SculptureCenter, New York (2018), and is currently on view at Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland through November 2020; and at the John Young Museum of Art at the University of Hawaii at Manoa through Spring 2021. Solo exhibitions include I'm normal. I have a garden. I’m a person at the Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2015), La Collectionneuse at Front Desk Apparatus, New York (2013), Carissa Rodriguez at Karma International, Zürich (2012), Busque el Ghost at Gaga, Mexico City (2010), Cherchez La Ghost at New Jerseyy, Basel (2009). Rodriguez participated in the Whitney Biennials of 2014 and 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She holds a BA in Literature from Eugene Lang College at The New School, New York (1994), and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (2001–2). She was a core member of Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York from 2004 to 2015. Rodriguez is a Lecturer at Harvard University in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies. 

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