PRESSURE

Jeff Larson and Richard Rodriguez

On view: September 14 - 25, 2026

Reception: Thursday, September 17, 2026 – 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
University of Miami Art Gallery @ The Chapel 
6565 Red Road, Room 112
Coral Gables, FL 33143

The University of Miami Department of Art & Art History presents Pressure, a two-artist exhibition featuring the work of Jeff Larson and Richard Rodriguez. Celebrate the opening on Thursday, September 17, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the University of Miami Gallery at The Chapel.

Pressure considers the forces that shape us, both seen and unseen. It is the weight of the atmosphere, the imprint of a hand in clay, the transfer of ink from plate to paper. It is also memory, expectation, inheritance, and desire. Though intangible, pressure leaves a trace.

Through printmaking, ceramics, and assemblage, Richard Rodriguez and Jeff Larson explore how force becomes form. Rodriguez's monotypes draw upon Indigenous visual traditions and personal heritage, layering gesture and mark as records of identity and remembrance. Larson's vessels bear the evidence of touch and labor, embodying both containment and vulnerability while holding space for reflection and absence.

Throughout the exhibition, clay yields, surfaces receive impressions, and materials become repositories of lived experience. What accumulates internally finds expression outwardly. Like weather shaping a landscape, pressure alters, transforms, and reveals. Rather than a burden alone, Pressure presents force as a generative condition, one through which memory takes shape, identities emerge, and meaning is made visible.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

Jeff Larson’s practice begins in the space between image and object, where memory gathers like clay in the hollow of a vessel. After fifteen years teaching fine art photography at the university level, he turned his attention toward an expanded studio practice in ceramics. Born and raised in Wisconsin and grew up in Washington, D.C., during the 1960s and 1970s, Larson developed a sustained engagement with a broad range of artistic media, each offering a different way to hold, mark, and translate experience.
 
His current work approaches the vessel as both a physical form and a poetic structure, bringing together the grain of printed surfaces, the ghosted depth of photographic imagery, and the tactile weight of clay. Through these materials, he creates layered assemblages that evoke the human body, the pressure of touch, and the traces of lived experience. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics, deepening his material research while preparing to establish an independent studio practice. 

Richard Rodriguez is currently pursuing an MFA in Printmaking at the University of Miami, his practice is grounded in an ongoing investigation of calligraphy as an expanded language, where text dissolves into gesture and form. Rooted in a sensibility that moves between memory and materiality, his work situates itself within a lineage that engages both abstraction and the diasporic condition.

Drawing on his Mexican Indigenous heritage, Rodriguez constructs a visual system in which calligraphy ceases to function solely as a linguistic sign and becomes a plastic structure. The oscillation between legibility and abstraction—at times recalling strategies associated with analytical cubism—introduces a productive tension between what can be read and what can only be perceived. Within this shift, the artist develops an intimate archive in which marks operate as carriers of experiences not fully translatable, establishing a bridge between cultural inheritance and contemporary context.

Pressure is on view through September 25, 2026, at the University of Miami Art Gallery @ The Chapel, 6565 Red Road, Coral Gables, FL 33143. Gallery hours are Tuesday–Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. For private tours, contact Milly Cardoso at m.cardoso1@miami.edu. Follow @umartgalleries on Instagram.