Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Contained 1–6

Photograph: Courtesy Team Gallery

If you didn’t get enough of the latest in funky new sculpture at the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” show, you’re in for a treat with Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s debut solo exhibit at Team Gallery. Her outsize assemblages employ seemingly discarded materials, just like Isa Genzken’s colorful, haphazard pieces—only Rodriguez uses artificial foliage and paint to evoke a tropical forest gone haywire.

“Overrun” is a series of treelike sculptures, the largest of which are 12 feet tall; they’re coated in several layers of vibrant epoxy paint and shiny plastic jewels, including hanging strands of gold chains. Another group, “Contained,” consists of six Plexiglas boxes installed on a wall, each filled with fake ferns and other plants. From a distance, the cases look like toxic terraria, but on closer inspection, it’s easy to identify their phony nature.

Based in Miami, Rodriguez seems engaged and repulsed by the environment she works in—a place where afternoon thunderstorms can make everything appear brighter and greener, and the landscape starts to feel sickeningly ripe. This overly humid ambience is present in her installations, though they also allude to South Florida’s expanding urban environment: Abandoned, a heap of scrubby flora on a foam base, is reminiscent of vistas visible from the region’s never-ending highways, where grassland is covered in oil and garbage. By representing these surroundings in ways both metaphoric and literal, Rodriguez creates sculptures that are striking and grotesque, verdant and withering, seemingly real and manufactured all at once.

—Lauren O’Neill-Butler