FIFTY8 GALLERY
presents
B-Line B-Boy Drawings and Sculpture
by Carlos Mare139 Rodriguez
58 Coles St. Jersey City, NJ. Friday May 1, 2009 7-11pm
FIFTY8 GALLERY
presents
B-Line B-Boy Drawings and Sculpture
by Carlos Mare139 Rodriguez
58 Coles St. Jersey City, NJ. Friday May 1, 2009 7-11pm
58 Gallery is easily accessible from NYC by Path. Enter the PATH train at 33rd, 23rd, 14th,
9th, Christopher St. or from World Trade Center in Manhattan and exit after two stops at
Grove Street in Jersey City. From there it is a short walk up Newark Ave. to Coles St.
where you make a right and find the gallery.
Artist Statement
B-Line B-Boy Drawings and Sculpture by Carlos Mare139 Rodriguez
May 1, 2009
Every generation of artists has their counterparts in music, art and dance, Picasso, Cocteau, Degas, Calder, Haring all collaborated with the modern dance masters of their era, mine was no different. With the development of early Hip Hop culture in the South Bronx during the mid 70s, the parallel existence of graffiti art, b-boying (breakdance), DJ music and rapping brought with it a radical new audio and visual language that even in its infantile stage spoke volumes of the use of primitivism, modernism and abstraction. Wordplay perplexed and tongue twisted the English language into metaphors of urban communiqué, music reengineered on the fly with the advent of technology and and techniques that enabled a back scratch to become part of the super symphonic public concert, B-Boys and B-Girls gathered around in ciphers to exorcise their bragging rights in a new ‘acrotribal’ dance form that was synchronized to the reconstructed beats and words of the DJ and or MC, style writers like myself on the sidelines would ingest all this energy and reconfigure into abstracted letter forms which would later find themselves painted on the side of subway trains.
The B-Boy series is my attempt to engage all these experiences into one distilled moment, a freeze frame that both in creative theory and practice fulfill the connection between all disciplines. They are in fact my modest attempt to jump into the dance cipher, the battle if you will, being that I did not have the physical finesse needed to compete I learned to have the mental and contextual capacity to be able to discern a great B-Boy from a weak one. My mentors were among the greats of the generation many of whom were either and or graffiti writers, Djs or MCs, in cahoots with a unique group of artists we explored the complexities of the art both in regard to the physical execution and historical referential points that were being discovered. The exchange proved invaluable as we were able to understand these synchronous discoveries but also how connected to the past we were without even knowing it.
Most artistic interpretations of the B-Boy/B-Girl are of caricature in nature, my breakthrough came by way of analytical process, lengthy discussions with the dancers and exposure to the dance, this insight afforded me to see it as an Avant-garde movement, a highly sophisticate modern dance that perpetually redefines all areas of expression. Its defiance of Darwinism, a disregard to the space and time continuum, something unlike any modern dance to date, the B-Boys in abrupt motions through space assault the open plane and weave in and out of complex geometries- many without missing a beat. This engagement in real time, space, sound and form energize the set stage, it provokes a higher dialogue about what one sees or thought they saw.
Years of wrestling how I would interpret these experiences came to a head in 1985, being an avid student of modernism I started to discover that the visual language I was looking for was within the works of both Cubist and Futurist but it wasn’t until I saw sculptors Marc di Suvero monumental works at Storm King in 1985 that the fuse was lit. In his work I found an enabling language in 2-D and later in sculpture, combined with the dynamics of the aforementioned periods I was able to bridge my life and experiences into a new art. Formulating these ideas about movement, form and space involved the distilling of the body, wire framing it and approaching motion so that it is by implied gestures that we become engaged. The weight of lines and the intersecting geometries are the means by which I suggest volume and depth, this modest attempt to pull it from space half sells the intention, one can really see the realization of this study in the Prince Ken Swift sculpture.
In the round as the dance is expressed serves the study best as one can see how complex and precise these intentions are both for artist and dancer.
