Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova Explores Barriers and Migration at Dimensions Variable

At Dimensions Variable, co-founder Rodriguez-Casanova draws inspiration from objects evoking immigrant travel across hostile boundaries in “State of Transition.” (Photo by Francesco Casale)

Cuban-born artist Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova is a seeker. He mines mundane remnants of immigrants’ uncertain travel. He seeks out their unsettling and imperfect beauty. A cotton tank top discarded as temperatures soar.  A plastic bag could double as a flimsy, unlikely suitcase.

In his solo show “State of Transition,” Dimensions Variable co-founder Rodriguez-Casanova draws inspiration from objects evoking immigrant travel across hostile boundaries.

Materials comprising the five sculptures here are reminders of such travel. His art often incorporates objects that could have been left behind.

A travertine cube is draped with pieces of fabric and transformed from a discarded building material to a poetic reminder of its earth-bound origins. (Photo by Francesco Casale)

Indistinct found photos integrated collage-like into his sculpture may stand for memories of places abandoned or encountered during hard-to-forget moments. The photos seem to show a rocky beach, a river skirting mountains, a chain-link fence enclosing an empty lot, an idyllic grassy field.

Rodriguez-Casanova endows his art with reminders of his own past, asserting that one of his biggest influences was his own immigration to Miami in 1980 as a child during the Mariel boatlift from Cuba.

A longtime Miami-based sculptor whose resume cites exhibits in New York, Cuba, Colombia as well as Miami, he has shaped these various remnants into precarious structures for “State of Transition.” They inhabit ghosts of architectural stability. They resist a readily mapped sense of place. Those indistinct photos are gleaned from his family archive. Combined with objects like fences and fabric in his art, they poignantly evoke urban migrations, travel to uncertain destinations.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research of the migration routes,” he says, mentioning studies conducted by anthropologist Jason De León. “Most of his research is happening on the border of Mexico and Arizona. . .Fences are being built where it is so desolate.” They are far from towns where immigrants might easily be spotted. Still, those fences along desolate borders are “incredibly difficult” to cross. “So this in the broadest sense is about barriers that we’re constructing in this country,” he says of his current exhibit.

Installation view of “State of Transition” at Dimensions Variable. (Photo by Francesco Casale)

Educated at New World School of the Arts and Ringling College of Art and Design, he has a notable history with boundaries and barriers from early in his career. They’ve intrigued the artist as a reminder of the working-class life he shared with his family in Miami. Growing up, he helped his electrician father on home-improvement projects, kindling his interest in making sculpture with sly architectural references.

In 2007 he created “A Fence Obstructing Space” for the art fair Scope Miami VIP lounge. A black aluminum fence, ornamented with faux rococo flourishes, was installed as a barrier to the lounge entrance. It wryly alluded to gated communities and the art world’s exclusivity. This work made access to the fair more difficult, according to the artist.

In 2007, Rodriguez-Casanova created “A Fence Obstructing Space” for the VIP lounge at the Scope Miami art fair. He installed a black aluminum fence with faux Rococo flourishes across the lounge entrance, leaving visitors only a 32-inch opening through which to enter. The deliberately obstructive work commented on gated communities and the exclusivity of the art world. He ensured the opening was ADA compliant.

“Inaccessible Gazebo” in 2008 was installed for six months at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, N.Y. Railings completely encircled the Victorian-styled white vinyl structure, allowing no point of entry. It implied an overtly picturesque challenge to the appearance of security and shelter in suburban gazebos.

And yet, in this more recent iteration of his perennial interest in boundaries and barriers, his art seeks a nuanced reinvention of what it means to face up to fences. “I’ve been exploring them as a lattice or receptacle for catching things. They’re holding on to remnants. . .keepsakes or artifacts, if you will,” he says.

Rose-printed fabric is suspended behind a black metal fence, which is bound tightly to remnants that seem scavenged from a modest home. (Photo by Francesco Casale)

Elements in the largest sculpture here, “Gate Composition (Insulated),” can be read almost like lines in a poem. Rose-printed fabric is suspended behind a black metal fence. Does it signify a curtain veiling a window for privacy? A sheet for much-needed bedrest? The answer is at least both. Packing straps in an incongruously peppy shade of yellow suggest unwanted restraint, even a kind of prison. They tightly bind the fence to what could be a white painted rectangle of wood scavenged from a modest bungalow.

Trapped within this sculpture is a pink panel of insulation. It defies its conventional purpose to protect home dwellers from extreme temperatures. Pressed close to the fence, raw lumber is neatly constructed to evoke an empty picture frame or a window lacking any view to the outside. The claustrophobic, layered composition itself seems to narrate disjointed attempts to reinvent home during a taxing journey.

“State of Transition” grows from Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova’s sustained investigation into the material systems that shape daily life at the margins.  (Photo by Francesco Casale)

In the four smaller pieces, the artist’s signature minimalist sense of metaphor is not always successful.  These works tend to possess a barren simplicity. They are composed of sparsely assembled ordinary objects, like a wooden mop handle, that do not resonate with broader significance. Instead, the smaller pieces function to some extent as call-and-response chants, reiterating imagery and themes more fully developed in “Gate Composition (Insulated).”

An exception is the smaller, but still poetically complex, “Composition (Earth).” It’s chiefly composed of a found travertine cube. Attached to the cube’s surface is a photo of a grassy field, alluding not to sleek architecture where one would expect to find this building material, but to its earth-bound origins. The cube is scarred by a peculiar indentation. “Probably it was considered damaged in some way. Maybe it was a mistake,” the artist says.

For him, that “mistake” resembles a crack in the earth. Folds of fabric partly cover the cube, as if, he adds “leaking” from the earth. A sponge rests near the fabric. At first glance the sponge is breathtakingly, absurdly banal.

Surely one implication is that the damaged earth, undergoing its own state of transition, may be cleaned by this vivid emblem of domestic immigrant labor.

WHAT: “State of Transition—Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova”

WHEN: 1 to 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday or by appointment only. Through Friday, Aug. 21, 2026.

WHERE: Dimensions Variable (DV), 101 NW 79th St., Miami

COST: Free

INFORMATION: 305-606-0058 and dimensionsvariable.net

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