Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado

Lives and works in Roswell, NM, USA

Artist statement

The after-school routine in 1989 was to rush to grandma’s kitchen drawer of discarded objects. A broken spray nozzle & empty pill bottle would make a competent laser gun, while a door wedge and a couple of thimbles were the beginnings of a spaceship - main cabin and thrusters respectively. Those afternoons were usually occupied with the task of finding the hidden relationships between disparate objects & materials. “Usually”, except for Tuesdays. On those days I'll wait by the orange trees for the overflight of the American warplanes. Their tail fins mirrored heraldry I've seen in movies before. My favorite was an iron gauntlet clutching a thunderbolt. I could swear that at least once the pilot waved back at me. At night I’ll sit in front of the TV for the week’s Spanish-dubbed episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The TV was an oracle relaying a vision of the future. My childhood imagination was obsessed with the technological utopia the show promised, with the USS Enterprise and its brave crew “boldly going where no one has gone before”. In between segments were ads for the Puerto Rico 2004 Olympics Venue Commission. The 21st century promised a brave new world where we would build a high-speed rail, a futuristic Olympic stadium, and a new apartment complex for the athletes. Every apartment, like the cabins of the Enterprise, would have its built-in wall-screen console. Twenty-one years into the future I found myself in New Mexico. The pandemic lockdowns were...

Artwork