Come One Come All
PRESS RELEASE
EVENT: Porterville College Art Gallery presents Come One, Come All, a solo exhibition by Idaly Rodriguez.
DATES OF SHOW: November 9 – December 10, 2026
OPENING: Monday, November 9, 2026, at the Porterville College Art Gallery
GALLERY HOURS: Monday – Thursday from 12 – 4 pm
PRESS RELEASE
Come One, Come All
Porterville College Art Gallery presents Come One, Come All, a solo exhibition by Idaly Rodriguez that brings together tantalizing oil portraits, symbolic lithographs, and graphic design prints. Drawing on her upbringing in a Mexican Catholic family, Rodriguez pairs Catholic imagery with circus scenes to explore how spectacle commands attention, inspires trust, and makes authority feel familiar. The title extends the invitation of a carnival barker. The exhibition asks what happens once we step inside this space.
For Rodriguez, the resemblance between the circus and the Church began with a childhood sense of unease. She saw the ringmaster in the priest and found a counterpart to the confessional booth in the carnival fortune-teller machine. Both comparisons turn on who is granted the power to speak and what the audience is prepared to believe. Across the oil paintings and prints, Rodriguez lets the allure of the spectacle coexist with the suspicion that something troubling is taking place behind the curtain.
The exhibition also considers the expectations Rodriguez saw placed on women in her family through Marianismo, an ideal of femininity modeled on the Virgin Mary that emphasizes passivity, modesty, and domesticity. As Rodriguez grew older, she came to recognize that some of her relatives had felt the same pressure she did to accept what they had been taught. The lamb, a recurring motif in the exhibition, gives this tension a visual form. Its associations with innocence, purity, and sacrifice raise a question about what can be asked of people in the name of those virtues.
Rodriguez also draws on the disturbing carnivals of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and J. G. Ballard’s The Recognition. In these stories, the promise of a marvelous spectacle draws people in before they understand what it may cost them. In Come One, Come All, that sense of belated recognition connects the circus to the artist’s experience of questioning beliefs learned in church and at home. The invitation remains open, even as the work asks viewers to look more closely at who is extending it.
Come One, Come All opens Monday, November 9, at the Porterville College Art Gallery from 12:00–4:00 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view Monday through Thursday, 12:00–4:00 p.m., through December 10, 2026. For more information, please contact Gallery Director Theodore Lyons at theodore.lyons@portervillecollege.edu.
