Juan Rodriguez Sandoval (He/Him/His) is a Guatemalan-born (Central America), Latin-Australian interdisciplinary environmental artist working and based in Brayakaulung country, South East Gippsland (Victoria, Australia).
His current work and practice correlate to the practices of BIPOC regenerative agriculture and forestry, renewable energies that are thematically concerned with deep ecological time as a means to understand deep ancestry. Rodriguez’s current work is currently exploring the complex bureaucracies of land clearance, farming, development and pilgrimage in geologically rural areas, communities and countries as post-colonial destructive forces. Moreover, he is interested in how these grander relations to land and the self can eventually correlate to an intimately metaphorical and interpersonal experience through ecological mending.
His work seeks to characteristically and metaphorically create fictional manifestations coinciding and echoing the ancient place and eras that have become historically and geographically distant. To create a mythos and lore that explores timeworn ecologies, ways of being, and how these passages and precincts should be practised and preserved.
Rodriguez primarily works with an array of earthly, bio-organic matter, and found materials and practices recycled/up-cycled techniques through contemporary technologies to bring a consensus and a reflective experience to further remind the spectator about ecological awareness, culture, and sustainable approaches to art-making.
Juan has shown at School House Studios, Blindside gallery, Trocadero Art Space, Noir Darkroom, Kingston Arts Gallery, Intermission Gallery, Monash University, Brickwall Studios, No Vacancy Gallery, Marfa Gallery, The Other Art Fair, Community-run-space Woven Projects, Incinerator Gallery and debuting at the ASA, CSSA, SSSA International Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. Juan has been a finalist for the McClelland award for small sculpture and has successfully taken an Artist residency with Brazilian Artist Run Space, Olhão, in Barra Funda, São Paulo, Brazil, and The Land Art Collective in London, England. Furthermore, Juan's work is housed in private collections in Australia and overseas. Juan has also completed a major Public art commission by the Latrobe Regional Gallery, Latrobe City Council and endorsed by the Moe to Yallourn Rail Trail Committee and communties of Moe, Newborough and Yallourn.
He is currently taking a Summer Residency with the Centre (for) Projection Art where he is currently developing experimental, temporal and kinetic forms of projection and a new body of work to entice Central American forms of celebration and ritual to act as anticolonial agents for these modern technologies.

(T) Artist Juan Rodriguez Sandoval installing Bed II at Blindside Gallery, 2020. Photo by Caitlin M. Rutherford, 2020. (B) Detail of Install documentation of The Golden Record, 2019 at School House Studios, Collingwood. Photo by Juan Rodriguez Sandoval.
