A Little Step Towards Everything
A Little Step Towards Everything
Ariya Martin + Kathy Rodriguez
August 6-28, 2016
TEN Gallery
4432 Magazine St.
New Orleans, LA 70115
In 2005 and early 2016, Kathy Rodriguez and Ariya Martin’s relationships to their respective long-term partners began and ended. The work in this exhibition documents the build-up towards their break-ups, and the revelations, truths, incidents, and feelings that filled the aftermath of the dissolutions of their decade-long partnerships.
Martin and Rodriguez, who met as instructors at the University of New Orleans in the fall of 2008, began a series of weekly drawing sessions in 2014. This work was a commitment to themselves, in support of each other and in an expression of friendship. They shared their experiences in their relationships, which were marked with various trials and with an ever present hope towards success . They worked collaboratively and simultaneously, sharing written notes about the drawings throughout the week and working on ideas and drawings together in their meetings. Both felt as though they were channeling more innocent selves, still floating on clouds and rainbows of hope in their love worlds, which were being crushed by the realities of heartbreak, mistrust, lies, anger, violence, and eventually failure .
Through their respective separations, they continued to draw on found paper with a variety of materials: pens, colored pencil, pastel, ink, and watercolor. They additionally developed the idea of an installation that built on the structure of an apartment or a bedroom – a private, interior space often decorated with hopes, and often the site of love and heartbreak’s most intimate and painful moments. The resulting installation also references the interior space of the mind, body, and heart, where thoughts anxiously reverberate and build at the same time as hard work leads to comfort, self-care, and healing. Pain pushes against pleasure in the space.
Grieving is described as a process for a reason. Heartbreak is a broadly shared experience; that there is a Museum of Broken Relationships, which houses mementos from thousands of ended partnerships, is a testament to that fact. Martin and Rodriguez also share the familiar role that many women play: the fixer of broken things. The universal irony in the expectation of that role is that no matter how much we devote ourselves to another, we must always acknowledge and work on what needs fixing within the self. The iconic, relatable imagery in the installation points to this kind of universality, and to the process of hurting and healing, in its various manifestations, which marks all of our lives.
