Artborne Magazine June 2017 | Page 35

chris “tobar” rodriguez A Unity of Self by Benjamin Gallagher Christopher Rodriguez, otherwise known as Tobar, builds emotion with the presence of objects in collections like Man in the Mask, My Dexterous Shadow, and Native. In each of them, he installs symbols like arrows and gas masks that represent a person’s persona. The arrows pierce themselves through the arms and hands of people in Native, evoking the impression of pain, while the gas masks in My Dexterous Shadow provide a sense of mystery to the viewer. I sat down with Tobar one afternoon to talk about the evolution of these symbols and how he plans to use them in future works. “At some point in their life, everyone wears a gas mask”, Tobar says about the object’s presence. Metaphorically, people wear it to protect their raw identity from the rest of the world. The object makes its debut in Man in the Mask, a collection that features a man wearing a gas mask to protect himself from the outside world—a world that will try and persuade him into reconsidering his ideas of self and creativity. However, by putting on the mask, he also chooses to live inside the persona of someone else, much like how Batman chooses to wear a mask because of the danger that threatens his personal life if discovered as Bruce Wayne. Native Touch, mixed media Orlando Arts & Culture, v. 2.6 34