Whitney Biennial 2019

Floor 5

Born 1970 in New York, NY
Lives in New York, NY

By capturing a series of sculptures with the time-based medium of video, Carissa Rodriguez focuses on a selection of Sherrie Levine’s Newborn sculptures (1993–94), which are refabrications in crystal and black glass of Constantin Brancusi’s Le nouveau-né or Newborn (1915). Reproducing Brancusi’s original multiple times, Levine’s feminist intervention introduced questions of splitting, doubling, and the labors of artistic and biological reproduction. With The Maid Rodriguez puts Levine’s sculptures into circulation, tracking them over the course of a day through various collections: homes, galleries, and museums. By presenting the video in tandem with All the Best Memories are Hers—a photographic portrait of cryogenically frozen embryos created in a fertility clinic and imaged by an Embryoscope (a device that is part incubator, part camera)—Rodriguez pushes the Newborn into new territory, questioning what paternity and the modernist fantasy of absolute origins can mean in an age of advanced reproductive technologies. By juxtaposing biological time with the eternal life of the art object, together her works examine the interstice between subject and object, person and property, and delve into the structures of modern kinship and personhood.