“Texas's 33rd” is part of Lordy Rodriguez’s series of drawings based on Gerrymandered Congressional Districts. Using the language of cartography, Rodriguez makes drawings that go beyond map-making into abstracted, imaginary terrain. In his new body of work, using a randomized process of selecting color, Rodriguez identifies the highly irregular shapes of disputed districts, raising questions about democracy, voter suppression and representation.

This district covers Fort Worth and Dallas, created after the 2010 census. Here the artist has chosen to use only earth tones for the district itself, and black and white outside the district. While we read the earth tones as variations of skin color, they are meant not as a direct representation of the population's diversity, but rather as a statement on the arbitrariness with which we define racial distinctions. The nuances that really define a community are disregarded in the gerrymandering process. The black and white background alludes to the polarity of the electorate at large.