The In-Between: Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez & Erin LaRocque

For the final show of our 20th anniversary year, we again have curated a special Double Exposure program from our archive of past submissions, pairing two artists who we regret having never shown.

The curation of these shows is meant to illuminate an important value of Roots & Culture—honoring the dignity of our applicants. We are sensitive to the time and energy that artists dedicate to submitting proposals. As artists, ourselves, we are intimately familiar with the sinking feeling of receiving rejections. We have always prioritized repeat applicants in our review process — artists who have shown a strong determination to exhibit at Roots & Culture and had the grit to apply multiple times.

For this pairing we will present new work by two artists, Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez & Erin LaRocque, with seemingly disparate practices. We might be given too much credit for clever curatorial choices in pairing artists for Double Exposure, when in fact, we are simply honoring the data of the highest scoring applicants (and these two artists consistently ranked very highly with their submissions.) On the other hand, an under-rated aspect of the program is a dynamic tension that can arise from two bodies of work that on face value may not have any clear throughlines — creating new meanings and aesthetic vibrations. We know this show will be a stunner. Both artists work in abstraction and there is in fact, a commonality to their approaches — their practices ask questions about inclusion in a historically exclusionary discipline, both in terms of authorship and media.

More about the artists in their own words:

Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez

By way of their supposed contention, my intent is to bring together a reinterpretation of geometric/formalist abstraction—perhaps emphasized by post-war abstraction—continental philosophy, literature, and Black and Brown studies to develop a body of work that may start to assist in a reimaging of our relations to space-time. By utilizing painting as a rigorous investigation into spatial optics, I hope to place the practice within a persistent discourse of intersectional history, serving as a praxis for reconceptualizing our understandings to space and time and how it has shaped our constructions of representation/identification—that these studies be entangled and not sequential. Alongside the more academic and literary research, which includes Denise Ferreira da Silva, Gilles Deleuze, Robert Glück, Fred Moten, and Sandra Ruiz (to name a few); this body of work is also a response to personal grief, losses, and desires that have, in turn, led to my own questions of how I have come to understand time, space, and painting. 

Erin LaRocque

I cultivate collaborative, multi-kingdom artworks that intertwine the lives of Reishi mushrooms, known as “the mushroom of immortality,” various medicinal plants, and my honeybees with my own. These unpredictable, living tapestries and sculptures serve both practical and visionary purposes- they are personal gardens to cultivate beneficial compounds that can be consumed to improve one’s health and wellbeing, natural sites to provide companionship, joy, and therapeutic “soft fascination” within in an urban environment, and a demonstration of the possibilities of inter-species collaboration.

My embedded motifs reference and subvert florals and other organic patterns which have been historically used to bring a beautiful but sanitized and idealized version of nature indoors for human enjoyment. In these works, agents of nature form a collaborative work as dictated by their own life cycles, liberated from humans’ conventional standards of beauty. Allowing agents of the natural world to represent themselves as they are, and as they adapt to human intervention, is a way to tease the boundary between what’s considered beautiful, subversive, acceptable, or grotesque in nature, and in objects intended for human contemplation.

Bios:

Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez (b. 1995) is an artist from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a BFA in Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2018 and an MFA in Painting & Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2024. He currently works and lives in Chicago, IL.

Erin LaRocque cultivates collaborative, multi-kingdom artworks that intertwine the lives of Reishi mushrooms, known as “the mushroom of immortality,” various plants, and honeybees with her own, to make tapestries and sculptures that reference both the passage of time and the myriad ways humans perceive, use, and appreciate nature. 

Erin lives and works in Chicago, IL.  Two decades of growing mushrooms and an interest in biology and patterns in nature- both visual and cyclical, led to this ongoing project.