Commissioned for the Lake Tahoe exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2015, Lordy Rodriguez’s work approaches the subject in a unique way. Rather than the natural, serene beauty of region, Rodriguez was instead captivated by the bustling multitude of surrounding restaurants, bars, and stores. For the artist, these places signify the Tahoe of today, and he spent four months of research and eight months of continuous drawing, meticulously mapping out their distinctive signs like natural landmarks, seen from overhead.

Rodriguez uses the map as a framework within which he experiments with unorthodox combinations of familiar visual languages from a variety of sources. The circular forms composing the wrapping-paper-esque lake are a reference to secci discs used to measure water clarity. The surrounding pattern is derived from the traditional Lake Tahoe logos, and the colors are drawn from a recent rebranding scheme for South Lake Tahoe. In a way, the work itself almost becomes one large sign, a retro-style advertisement for the myriad commercial attractions the region has to offer. But beyond the flashy signage is a commentary on the chaos humans have brought to this natural place.

Eccentric and visually magnetic, at its core, Rodriguez’s work explores the human desire to locate and define oneself by charting the environment in precise detail; a desire the Filipino-American artist could intimately relate to having moved around frequently in his youth. His work is about the language of cartography, but he goes beyond the given terrain—manipulating, simplifying, and pushing the traditional iconography of mapmaking towards fantastical abstraction. Rodriguez takes the fundamental purpose of the map and subverts it, simultaneously forcing us to see things from another perspective, and permitting us to fill in the gaps with our own memories, experiences, and perceptions.