Maddie Jones Rodriguez there's a leak
July 11th – August 17th, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, July 11th, 6-9 pm
In her debut solo exhibition for PRACTICE, Maddie Jones Rodriguez exaggerates the architecture of the gallery space to force the viewer to contend with its imperfections. In these moments of inadequacy, the artist helps us search for something beautiful.
Across her practice, Rodriguez explores plumbing as a labor-intensive construction trade that underpins modern society and connects these systems to our own internal bodily processes. Plumbing is a physical web that manages our bodily functions through the geography of society. Yet it exists almost completely as a ghost within our bodies and homes, hidden underneath layers of drywall or epidermis. If all is going to plan, we can ignore its presence. But these networks can reveal pathways that link us all.
By examining these systems that connect us, we can destabilize the boundaries between self and other. The investigation into the porosity of the body, can reveal how barriers—whether architectural, social, or psychological—are ultimately transient and permeable.
Rodriguez’s sculpture utilizes second-hand materials like home fixtures, pipes and recycled materials to examine how arbitrary societal standards shape both individual and collective experiences. She also works with ubiquitous materials like toilet paper to reimagine our relationship to waste and fragility.
The formal qualities of her work are guided by an interest in humor and the abject. Satire often points out underlying structures within society and illuminates capricious social hierarchies. She leverage’s humor’s association with bodily waste to remind us of our tangible, corporeal existence. It is Rodriguez’s hope that this typically avoided physicality can serve as a point of familiarity.
there’s a leak, is an exhibition created to reimagine the bodies’ edges and limits. Towards the goal of more engaged connectivity, these works highlight the generative qualities of dilapidation and demise. Here—cracks, holes and leakage are the life force, and vulnerability is the currency. The show is an exploration of the energetic body and the ways in which we crack open and leak onto one another.
