San Miguel Sunday: Why did you choose Love as your muse of conflict?

Isis Rodriguez: Love has been defined by adolescents and young adults under 40. Very little is written about love over 40. After the break up of a 10 year relationship with my boyfriend, many of my gay friends encouraged me to go on Tinder. I did. I have spent an entire year navigating dating apps, going to bars and clubs, dating and hanging out with singles over 40. The results were so profound that I had to do a show about it.

SMS: How is love conflicted?

IR: I consulted with online dating coaches to help me put a nice profile with pictures and to my surprise I got 100 likes in less than 8 hours on Tinder. But only one wrote to me. I asked dating coaches what to do and they said unanimously, "The woman needs to make the first move." While this went against the way I was raised, I contacted all 100 likes and asked them the same question. "Is it true that the woman needs to make the first move?" This pick up line broke the ice. Not only did they respond, I got six dates, some of which became multiple dates. On those dates, I learned of men's fears, perceptions and expectations. This was in large part because I asked them, "Why are you afraid to make the first move?" They answered that they thought that they would be rejected or that they are afraid of offending me. So obviously these men have desire and yet they are afraid of it. They also told me how they were crushed by loss of past relationships, of the hard work it took to maintain the role of provider and to find meaning in their lives.

SMS: So what is The Unbroken about?

IR: It's a new archetype I created from listening to the stories of men. The Unbroken is a man wearing a bull mask with banderillas clavadas in his back and a bleeding sacred heart tattoo with fireworks. I wanted to create an archetype that celebrated the resilience of an abused man. The bleeding heart tattoo is important not just in Christian iconography, but also, in Spain and Mexico, in bullfights as the heart is the place they strike the bull in the final thrust.

Gone
***

SMS: Tell us about Gone?

IR: Gone is an archetype to celebrate the resilience of an older woman, a woman who is undergoing menopause. The lion skin is because "cougar" is a popular term in American dating culture to describe an older woman who is still sexually active, that is, on the hunt for a man. She wears a corsage made of gardenias, because gardenias signify death and her body is in the beginnings of deterioration.

**************

Isis Rodriguez, received her degree in painting from the University of Kansas in 1989 and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco California. Her 1st solo exhibition, "My Life as a Comic Stripper" debuted in 1997 at Galeria de la Raza, and was an investigation of sex positive feminism, primarily exotic dancers, questioning whether their work was a moral issue or a labor issue, scandalizing the feminist community. Later that year she was recognized as one of San Francisco's most promising artists in the show "Bay Area Now" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has exihibited internationally, at the Museum Timoteo Navarro, Tucumán, Argentina, and Museo Regional de Guanajuato at La Cervantino Festival. Her artwork has been critiqued and published in several books, including Judy Chicago and Edward Lucie Smith's Women and Art: Contested Territory and Vicious, Delicious, and Ambitious: 20th Century Women Artists.