Effie Rodriguez is the type of girl who doesn’t want to work a desk job her whole life.
She’s the type of girl who got frustrated when other children didn’t color inside the lines during grade school.
She’s the type of girl with a Keyboard Cat pin on her purse.
Rodriguez, a senior drawing major, is showing her work beginning today in The Gallery in the Reitz Union until Nov. 28.
But she isn’t the type of girl to have any ordinary type of drawing project on display. From Longcat to the O RLY Owl, her art features some prominent memes, or comical pictures, jokes, phrases and videos from the Internet, hence the name of her exhibition — “The LOL Show.”
“Everyone uses the Internet, but not a lot of people know about the Internet,” she said.
Traditionally, memes are meant to be humorous but they can often be very crude. For that reason, Rodriguez wanted to paint them in a different light.
“I’m really trying to put memes into a serious academic, artistic context,” she said. “I consider memes to be one of the biggest collaborative art projects in the history of mankind.”
Originally, she wanted to do something more traditional for this series.
“I felt more pressured to something more traditional. I looked online and asked myself, ‘Why can’t I do this?’”
Many of her paintings feature landscapes made of these memes — called LOLscapes — that are meant to illustrate how she interprets the Internet world.
Hills are made of multitudes of O RLY owls, the sky is made of Dramatic Chipmunks and the moon is composed of multiple Longcats.
She used the repetition in her work, she explained, to represent how prominent memes are on the Internet.
Rodriguez is also fascinated with the mythologies that arise around memes.
She finds it fascinating that Internet users make up their own stories for them, stories that become part of the meme itself. She is quick to compare things like Greek mythology to them as well.
“I’m a big sucker for Greek mythologies,” she said. “I’m fascinated by how these stories are a meme itself.”
Though one of her pieces features the story behind Longcat and his nemesis, Tacgnol (that’s longcat backwards), another features the two in a much different context.
In “The Temptation,” they are portrayed as Adam and Eve from the Bible - Tacgnol is tempting Longcat with the knowledge of the Internet.
In addition to the more traditional forms of art, Rodriguez designed a video game to go along with her exibition.
The game features a 3D landscape that allows you to walk around and interact with different memes.
“I want it to be a way to explore the world in a digital medium,” she said. “I bring the topic full circle.”
Rodriguez has spent the past year working on all of the pieces for her exhibition.
When two workers walked into the gallery, they immediately recognized the characters in her art and started laughing and discussing them.
Rodriguez sat in her chair not too far away, watching and smiling.
“I’ve done my job as an artist when I’ve elicited this reaction from people,” she said.
She said she has spent many sleepless nights working on a number of the pieces in this exhibition.
“After today, I can sleep again.”
To see more memes, go to knowyourmeme.com.
