In the photo series 'Yesterday I Tried to Paint You' (2012) Rodriguez worked with an andrologist to create photographic images of sperm that she procured from a donor. The rights to use this sperm specimen have been legally signed over to Rodriguez, for artistic and/or personal use. The sperm is cryogenically frozen at Cornell Center for Reproductive Medicine and she pays a monthly rent for storage. The sperm is digitally enlarged – a single unit of reproduction, pure code like the pixels that constitute its image. Beyond the clinical and legal dimensions of the work, Rodriguez also sees the photographs as uncanny portraits of a loved one, of organic material that may of may not constitute a future life. Rodriguez doesn’t mean to suggest that assisted reproduction technology is a dystopic thing, but potentially the present and future of kinship. With this work she looks at the economy of such processes – how the gift and debt function here, and furthermore what is abstracted and unquantifiable in these exchanges.

The title of the series comes from an interlude in Beyoncé’s 'Dangerously in Love' album where she proclaims, “Yesterday I tried to paint you but the colours weren’t beautiful enough. Your love goes beyond what I can say.” By isolating small groupings of the sperm and using a subtle colour palette Rodriguez treats these DNA cells with particular reverence; the work is an attempt to capture the essence, and potential, of a lover.