Legenda Breathe: Divine Nights

Allison Maria Rodriguez

Legends Breathe: Divine Night is part of a larger body of work exploring the power of creativity and the imagination in overcoming trauma. The whole project is based on interviews with different female-identified and non-binary artists about childhood fantasies, and I decided for ILLUMINUS to focus on a particular fantasy that involves a magical nativity scene, featuring a non-binary central figure surrounded by endangered animals, nestled inside a vintage Sears Dept Store manger from the 1980s. This fantasy is a powerful display of the reclamation of a dominant christian narrative by the imagination of a young child. With ILLUMINUS taking place so close to Christmas this year and in the financial district, the piece also speaks to the long history of the commodification of the natural world.

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Allison Maria Rodriguez is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in video installation. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction and the interconnectivity of existence. Through video, performance, digital animation, photography, drawing, collage and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional and conceptual exploration.