Dylan Cale Jones: My name is Dylan Cale Jones,
Isa Rodriguez: and I'm Isa Rodriguez,
Dylan Cale Jones: and you are listening to Practice Practice. I'm very excited today. I am going to be interviewing my favorite co-host. Isa Rodriguez.
Isa Rodriguez: Hi.
Dylan Cale Jones: Hi. How are you Isa?
Isa Rodriguez: I'm doing well. It's a beautiful morning. We just went on a walk. I've got my beverages, so I'm ready to go.
Dylan Cale Jones: Excellent. Well, since you're ready to go, will you please introduce yourself and share a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Isa Rodriguez: Sure. My name is Isa Rodriguez. I'm an artist and designer. I'm an educator. I am a queer person and I identify as Latinx. I live in Oklahoma City and I co-produce this project with you, Practice, Practice.
Dylan Cale Jones: Great. So, Isa, I want to get right into our questions. And our first question is, how did you experience creativity when you were growing up? What was that like for you?
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, sure. When I was young, my world really revolved around creativity. I think it's that way for a lot of young people, that creativity and imagination and curiosity is sort of everything. I spent a lot of time drawing and writing and taking pictures and playing music and experimenting with all different kinds of mediums and approaches.
The, the thing I definitely did the most was drawing. I spend a lot of my time now drawing as well.
Dylan Cale Jones: What kinds of things were you drawing and how were you drawing when you were a young person?
Isa Rodriguez: I drew a lot of animals. I lived in New Mexico and so I drew animals that I had seen in the desert. Animals like jackrabbits and deer and lizards and spiders and roadrunners. Coyotes. I drew big scenes with all different kinds of animals in them.
I drew birds a lot. I liked birds. I remember this really involved drawing of a penguin in kindergarten and I recall trying out really interesting combinations of colors that were new for me, a little bit surreal. So this penguin had a lot of different blues. I was definitely influenced by the Lisa Frank folders that I saw. So I really started experimenting with color in my, in my animal drawings. Yeah. And when I finished the drawing, my teacher asked to keep it. I think that was probably my first sense of artistic audience and that was really exciting.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. It's almost like the child equivalent of making a sale.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. I probably gave it to her. I liked her a lot. Yeah. She really encouraged me.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. Those experiences I think can be really formative as a young person, receiving external validation and praise from adults about the things that they see potential in.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. And it, I guess it sort of started there. I went on to continue to receive a lot of attention and education around drawing specifically. A lot of training. Both my parents, are artists, and educators. At the time my dad was working at UNM as a printmaking faculty. So they were really serious about cultivating my technical ability.
Dylan Cale Jones: Wow. That's pretty unique. What was it like for you growing up with two parents who are artists?
Isa Rodriguez: It was very creative. From a young age, I really watched them pursue art and pursue their creative practices in a really serious way. Their friends were also artists. I would say almost all of the adults around me were artists or musicians or scientists, but were really creative, interesting people. And so I grew up in an environment where everyone was really serious about pursuing their interests. I had a lot of examples of different ways that it could look to be an artist or a creative person. I was included in all of that really young. So as a child, I was at exhibitions and concerts and at recitals and at meetings. I was exposed to the art world as quite a young person
Dylan Cale Jones: That's pretty amazing. From my perspective, to be able to see adults who are artists having thriving careers is a pretty unique experience. There's this cliche in American culture that parents discourage their children from becoming artists because they don't see the possibility of art helping people survive economically. But it sounds like you're in this cultural space where you are seeing that all the time.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. It was the only thing that I saw. .And so I really didn't know very much about lives outside of that. So it was always, taken for granted that I would be an artist or a teacher and and my creativity was really encouraged by everyone around me.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And it also seems like from what you've told me before that you were in this specific scene in Albuquerque, New Mexico that had this unique or eccentric creative culture. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like?
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah I grew up in Albuquerque in the 90s. At the time It was a very affordable place to live and there was a lot of real weirdos living there who all would get together and do weird things. The landscape out there is pretty amazing and inspiring. The desert is so open and so interesting. It really opens the imagination. There's a lot of room for ideas and thoughts. When I'm somewhere that's much more closed, say I'm in a dense urban area like Manhattan, I find my thoughts are kind of compressed, but then when I'm somewhere large and open, thoughts really wander and fill up that space. There's a lot to just stare out at.
We would go out on the public land. There's not really fences and it's just brush and cactuses and, tarantulas and rocks and all kinds of interesting, curious stuff and we would go out there and just walk for forever. There's not really trails. You can just crawl around the mesas and check things out. I think that really informed me. I still really enjoy walking around and looking at things and walking over the same ground and watching how the seasons change it and looking down and picking things up, picking up rocks and sticks and seeds and different things and exploring my world in that way.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. That does seem like a foundational aspect of your practice. We go on walks a lot and talk about our ideas and collect things. That seems to be a verdant place for you in terms of generating ideas and thinking through things and observing and experiencing.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think of it as being deeply human. That sort of walking through the world and looking around and learning from it is something that I think is really natural for humans to do, and it really feeds my creativity to do that. So I try and get that time in on the land.
Dylan Cale Jones: So this is an excellent time to transition, I think, to start talking about what your practice is like now. What is your practice like now? What are you thinking about? What are you working on?
Isa Rodriguez: What's at the top of my mind is this project. We're in a really peak moment of activity here. We've just finished a ton of interviews. We had a book release like two weeks ago. We have a lot of behind the scenes work that's happening, editing and writing copy and putting things together.
Classes are also about to start and I'm teaching drawing and I'm teaching ceramics and I have a natural dye workshop coming up where I'm teaching Indigo. So there's a lot of prep work that is happening there, both for Practice Practice and for my teaching practice, which is my predictable income.
Then, I also have started a new body of work that I've been thinking about for a couple of years that's just starting to really take shape in a serious way. So that's really exciting and a little bit overwhelming to be handling everything at once and balancing all these different creative things. It's a spring is usually a period of really like high creativity, high activity for me.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. That sounds like a lot to be thinking about and balancing right now.
Isa Rodriguez: It is. It is.
Dylan Cale Jones: I want to hear a little bit about this new body of work or project that you've started. And I know from knowing you that it also has to do with your identity and experience as a Latinx person. Can you talk about those things and how they relate to each other and what it is that you're actually doing?
Isa Rodriguez: Sure. I'll start by saying that this part of my practice is a little bit more private. A lot of my work for Practice Practice and my teaching work is very public and I interface with people I don't know and I am talking all the time and teaching all the time and really sharing a lot of myself.
But my studio practice, I hold a little bit closer to myself and a lot of it is for me. Sometimes I share it, but I really try to go into it with the mindset that I don't have to share it. Like it doesn't, it doesn't have to be for anyone except me.
So the project I'm working on right now in my personal studio practice is exploring my, identity and heritage as a Latinx person. Part of my family is from Venezuela and is from the Guajira peninsula and is specifically Wayuu. That's something that I carry with me all the time. Whether it's recognized or not. I carry it with me, but also I didn't grow up in it so I need to really define my relationship to that for myself. And I'm working on doing that through my art right now.
One of the ways that I access that information is through stories, cosmologies, and stories about like the creation of the world and the creation of people and the creation of the landscape. And those stories have characters that have a really strong spiritual presence. Characters like Jaguar and Rattlesnake and Pulowi, who is an earth spirit and Juya, who's a rain spirit, and the deer, Deer is another really important one. My family is Deer People, according to the clans.
So I'm thinking about these energies. I'm thinking about these characters and thinking about how I relate to them and how I can embody them and what they mean to me.
And starting to make drawings and write stories based on the mythology, short stories based on the mythologies that create a retelling of them for myself. I think about what a younger version of me needed. And how I needed to see myself reflected in the stories and couldn't. So I'm rewriting the stories so that they reflect me and my experiences, but still using these ancient characters.
There's a tradition of creating patterns that illustrate stories and the patterns are really abstract and really vibrant, really bright and intense. And I think about those patterns as I'm working on the stories. I also am designing patterns and trying to redraft some of these patterns to represent what I'm seeing in my world.
Dylan Cale Jones: Wow. It sounds like it could be intense to investigate those things.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, and these energies are so, so old and so powerful.
So to engage with them, I really need to have healthy boundaries around what I can let in and what I need to keep outside of me. I'm also doing these big drawings based on these characters and the last one I did was this huge jaguar drawing and it's about five feet by six feet. It's really enormous and it's really visceral. It's really intense to draw that big and it just eats up materials and creates a lot of... gore to, to be working that large.
I can't bring a Jaguar into my apartment. I need to have more space to make this drawing because our apartment is too small to hold the Jaguar energy in it. So I have to find like a bigger room to go work on these drawings somewhere else. And I'm using the studio at Studio School over at the Oklahoma Contemporary, the drawing classroom, and it's big enough to hold the energy, but it's really you know, needing to kind of find those boundaries in advance before I open up to those energies, because from my perspective, they can really possess you.
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. I want to go back to something that you mentioned before about the stories that you are investigating in rewriting. You said that you are rewriting them to reflect yourself or to see yourself in them. How are you doing that? And what parts of yourself are you trying to put into those stories.
Isa Rodriguez: Something to know about the stories that makes them prickly or kind of difficult to handle, is that the stories have been translated sometimes like two or three times. . So the story would have originally been told in Wayuunaiki to a translator working with an anthropologist.
So then it would be translated into Spanish and then translated into French for the French anthropologist who would then write it down in a book. That book would eventually be translated into English. There's so many layers between me and the original story, and the original context. A lot of the nuance of the stories really get flattened.
For example, if there's a queer character in the story, that character really becomes flattened through these translations, and through the individual peoples' feelings about queer people, right? These anthropologists are working in the fifties and the seventies, they have their feelings about queer people, and that influences how they tell the retelling of the translation of the story. And so something I'm doing is trying to write queerness back into the stories. I think about gender a lot when I think about the characters. I think about how individual characters might identify or not identify with certain genders that are projected onto them. So that's sort of what I'm untangling, but it's still pretty slippery. I don't have like a really strong grip on it yet.
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. Sure. It sounds like a really powerful and important project for you.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is important to me.
Dylan Cale Jones: It sounds difficult to have room for other things in your life right now. So, are there other things that are happening in your life right now? And how are you balancing that with all of this output?
Isa Rodriguez: Well, something that we discuss in Practice Practice is creativity being a cycle.
So right now I'm at a point in the cycle that's very high output, in the space of idea and action, but earlier, in the winter, say a couple of months ago, there was a lot more space for rest and for other things.
Right now, I really want to be working on all these projects and I try to structure my life so that I feel supported to continue having a lot of output right now. For example, I try and plan ahead meals so that I don't have to be too creative about what I'm going to eat, that it's already decided.
I also build time for breaks and decompressing into my work schedule. So for example, today we're recording, then there'll be a little break and then I'll do some editing and then there'll be another break and then I'll go teach. But I try and keep the amount that I'm working to about two and a half hours at a time, with at least a 30 minute break, but hopefully like an hour, so that I can sustain momentum. And I also know that it won't be forever that in probably in about four weeks, I will lose steam and then I'll start winding down.
I work for myself and so I need to know what I'm doing about six months in advance. So I plan these times where there's a lot of activity and then less activity to recover. Hopefully not much is going to be going on in June and it'll be hot and hopefully I'll spend a lot of time laying in my hammock and napping and reading and maybe some writing. But it'll calm down a lot.
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. There's something that I'm hearing, which is that there's different scales of time that you're operating within that have their own cycles, right? It sounds like there's this seasonal cycle that you operate within where maybe Winter is a concentrated period of rest or reflection. Then you also have that same cycle happening on a daily level too. Even if there is a period, say spring where day to day you might be doing more production than in winter, you're still cycling through production and rest and production and rest so that you're hopefully not burning yourself out.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. Right now I've really organized my life so that I have a lot of space for creativity and creative output. But I also hit a wall often. I can only look at my computer screen and listen to audio for about three hours before I really need a break. I need to go outside and, and listen to the birds and the nothing, the wind. Yeah.
Dylan Cale Jones: Another thing that we do and talk about as well is how we support each other during times of high productivity. So for example, today we had a meeting in the morning to talk about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. And you were like, I am going to edit. And I need you, Dylan, to make sure that we eat lunch and eat dinner.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, I asked you to make the decisions about it. I said that I would help make the food, but that I needed you to decide what the food was and when we were going to eat it and when we needed to prepare it.
I feel really fortunate to have that support, to have someone there to help me. And for example, when we first got to Oklahoma, you and I lived with my parents and I'm really grateful for that because that meant there was more people we could kind of assign who was going to cook dinner on which nights and who was doing which chores and that really opened up a lot of space to get this project started, to get everything organized and get it underway so that we could build up momentum with this.
Dylan Cale Jones: Absolutely. Yeah. And that reminds me of another scale of time that I was reflecting on this morning too. Right now is high production and focused and directed. And a couple of years ago when we first moved, I felt like my sense of creativity and creative direction was very nebulous.
Isa Rodriguez: Was, that was a real rest period for us. Not knowing what was gonna happen and not having ideas and, not doing. Moving was hard and the pandemic was hard and there was a lot of just nothing that needed to happen.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yes.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. And then here we are a couple of years later, quite full.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yes.
Isa Rodriguez: And hopefully there will be nothing happening again soon. Yeah. Yeah. I think of it like a wave, like there's high points and low points on this wave. As high as it goes, it needs to also balance out by going that low as well.
And so. If I can keep that wave kind of long and even, then I don't get that whiplash. Instead, I have a long easy wave that builds and then levels out and then goes down a little bit, dips.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. So you don't get seasick.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. . Yeah, . Exactly. And seasick is burnout, right? Yeah. Seasick is exhausted and unbalanced.
Dylan Cale Jones: So, Isa, what is changing in your practice right now?
Isa Rodriguez: I think we've touched on a lot of the things that are changing right now. But something really specific that's changing is it's springtime. So every day, the flowers are different. Every day I pass some irises that were closed yesterday and are open today. The peonies are about to bloom. Which I just, I can't wait. I can't wait to draw them. I love drawing peonies so much.
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, you're touching on an interesting point too. We could say part of your creative practice, is your practice of observing and relating to the more-than-human world, and I think that's really important to you and is its own expression of creativity.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is part of my human practice. Creating my human life is really tied to the world around me, right? Whatever place I'm in, I feel really anchored in that place by my relationship to things like which plants are in bloom or what the weather is doing. Yeah. It's really core.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, and you mentioned drawing the peonies, which is, I agree, incredibly exciting and pleasurable and fun, but whether or not you are drawing the plants that you're noticing changing, I see that you're always engaging with them.
Isa Rodriguez: Sure. Drawing is my personal way of relating to them. I also like to photograph them. I also like to touch them and smell them. But it's just another sense of connection.
Dylan Cale Jones: I also see it feeding you in a way.
Isa Rodriguez: Definitely. Absolutely. It nourishes me. It keeps me sane. I'm really excited to get into drawing class in the spring because then I can share my excitement about drawing the world around me with my students, we can get flowers and draw those. And
Dylan Cale Jones: yeah, that's going to be great.
Isa Rodriguez: It's going to be a lot of fun.
I'm excited for my ceramics class. Cause it'll get me back in the ceramic studio, which I've had a break from. So as things pick up in other parts of my creative life, some things sometimes go a little bit dormant and I haven't made anything out of clay in a month or two. So I'm excited to get back, back in the mud.
Isa Rodriguez: I'm really excited for this indigo workshop. I'm excited to share indigo with people. I'm growing a lot of indigo right now for the Contemporary's Art Garden, so that we can source our own natural dye material. I'm really excited to teach people about this plant, which I think is just such a balm. It's so soothing.
Dylan Cale Jones: It seems like other people are really excited about it too.
Isa Rodriguez: I think so. I think so. I have a lot of students this spring. That becomes part of a cycle too, you know, like eight weeks on and then about four weeks off and then eight more weeks on. So yeah, it's ramping it up.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And I think something that I see from the outside too, which I hope you notice, is that you seem to have really caught your stride as a teacher at the Contemporary specifically. You've really gained a lot of confidence and know how to be responsive to the way that your students are learning and be willing to shift the way that you're teaching to support them in the ways that they need. It's brought a little bit more ease into the way that you're teaching.
Isa Rodriguez: Thanks for reflecting that. Sometimes I feel quite confident and other times, I don't know.
Dylan Cale Jones: That's very relatable.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. I really enjoy it and I want to be teaching in an open, responsive, flexible way.
Dylan Cale Jones: You're doing it! Congrats.
Isa Rodriguez: Thank you. Thank you.
Dylan Cale Jones: So Isa, we're going to start wrapping up our wonderful conversation and my first wrap up question for you is what advice do you have for your past self?
Isa Rodriguez: I will tell my past self that they are creative, and brilliant and so amazing and that whatever they're doing doesn't need to look like what anyone else is doing. However they want to be an artist doesn't need to look like how other people have been an artist. And that whatever they're doing is good enough like it is. It's good enough. And that they're, they're great. They're so great!
Dylan Cale Jones: That's really wonderful advice. It's really kind.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah it's something I needed to hear. I compared myself when I was younger to , like, I don't know, Picasso. I was in a, a very personal competition with Picasso.
Dylan Cale Jones: Did he know about this?
Isa Rodriguez: He didn't know. He didn't know. And I think about that now and it's like, wow, I was really setting myself up to feel defeated. I was comparing myself to someone who I couldn't be because I'm not Picasso.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah.
Isa Rodriguez: And then that was the standard I was holding myself to. And then of course I wasn't making that standard and then I would punish myself for it. And I think that that is really encouraged in art education. We look at these artists and we're supposed to learn from them, but really what I learned was to compare myself to them.
And it wasn't a setup for a healthy, well-adjusted relationship to creativity, and it took a lot to change that. And so I would offer myself the advice that whatever I'm doing is what I'm supposed to be doing, and it's good enough. It's already so great.
Dylan Cale Jones: That's great advice. Yeah. I like that.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dylan Cale Jones: Do you have any advice that you would give to your future self?
Isa Rodriguez: Yes. To my future self, whatever you want to do, whatever your ambitions are, you are already on the path. You're already doing it. You have already started. That even by having the idea, that's the first step to achieving it, whatever it is. And if you've had the idea, you're already halfway there. So don't worry so much about whether you are doing it or trying to do it or almost doing it. You are doing it. You've got it. You're doing it. You're already in it. So just look around.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, I really appreciate that advice because I think that it gives a lot of honor to the process of being creative. It helps me take my focus off finishing, whatever that means.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, like making mistakes is part of the path and trying things that don't work is part of creating it or completing it. Whatever is happening right now is a necessary step to doing it.
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, I really appreciate that, Isa, and I appreciate talking to you today. Thank you so much for sharing yourself.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Well, thank you. You were a gracious host. So, thank you.
Dylan Cale Jones: Practice, Practice is created by Isa Rodriguez and Dylan Cale Jones. The music you heard in this episode is by Kate Jarboe.
Isa Rodriguez: This season of Practice Practice is funded by a Thrive Grant from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Dylan Cale Jones: Thrive Grants fund community driven, artist led projects across the state of Oklahoma. Learn more and apply at ovac-ok.org
Isa Rodriguez: My name is Isa Rodriguez and you're listening to Practice Practice.