FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - San Francisco, CA - December 2020 - Maybaum Gallery is pleased to announce AFTERLIFE, a solo exhibition of recent photography by American artist Christopher Rodriguez. This selection of new photographs presents a confluence of representational photography with perspectives of nature. This is the artists' first premier exhibition in San Francisco.

Inspired by writings of 19th Century naturalist Alexander Humboldt, Rodriguez explores the contemporary landscape genre in themes of color, abstraction and still life. His photographs consider our changing relationships with nature in order to more closely speak to the world we live in. In his latest series of photographs, he builds fictional landscapes with artificial lighting to paint an astonishing world imagined of the future. He challenges color’s representational qualities to blur the line between natural and artificial as he reflects on the fragility of our environment and hopes for a renewable tomorrow.

"The world today is very different from the one Humboldt documented, as virtually every corner of the earth has been seen or altered by human use. We are within a new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, a time defined by radioactive particles scattered across the earth by human activity. 'Afterlife' is an attempt to re-discover our affected landscape as Humboldt must have felt as he saw strange new species and places. It is a way of visualizing landscapes as well as our own ideas of nature. " -Christopher Rodriguez.

Born in 1980 in New Orleans, Rodriguez earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Louisiana State University before going on to receive his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His work has been shown at the Newspace Center for Photography, Current Space, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, among others. His images have also been featured by Humble Arts Foundation, Wired and the Huffington Post. His first published monograph, Sublime Cultivation, is held at the Newspace Center of Photography Library and is also offered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is a visual arts educator and has taught courses at several institutions including Pratt, ICP and the School of Visual Arts. Maybaum Gallery is his West Coast representing gallery.

About the Gallery

Maybaum Gallery was founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Christina Maybaum. The gallery represents emerging and mid career artists with a focus on process-driven work. Located in downtown San Francisco, the gallery comprises 2,000 square feet of exhibition space for solo shows as well as additional viewing space for our growing roster of artists.  In addition to rotating exhibitions, the gallery provides private art consulting services to meet clients' unique art needs.