You could talk about anything and relate it to a map somehow.'

Not the traditional methods but, like, just a line with a circle on it, meaning, 'the path to the lake.' After realizing that and combining it with the sense of nostalgia I had with the landscape, I found that maps have such a great potential for any kind of discourse. Because mapping is probably the oldest visual language there is. Later on, thinking about it, it made so much sense. And I was feeling so homesick for Houston, through almost all four years of school, that I'd just look back, when I was in New York, just look at the map of Houston – where I'd lived, where I went to high school. 'And I was driving back and forth across the country, which I did every semester, but the only way I could really relate to the landscape was by looking at the map. But I was in school, and I didn't have any money, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll start drawing,' because sculptures are too expensive, and I've always been good 'Back then, the work I was doing was closer to Damien Hirst or Francis Bacon type of work – totally different and mostly sculptures, like Hirst's shark-in-the-tank kind of work. from the Philippines when he was 3 years old. 'It started off with me driving back and forth between Houston and New York when I was in undergraduate school,' says the disarmingly young (33) artist whose family moved to the U.S. These maps are enormous, strictured and structured swaths of text-bedecked hues, representing 55 states – because Rodriguez also includes the states of Disney, Hollywood, Internet, Monopoly, and Territory – and they're the culmination of a decade's worth of work. What it is, is this country of ours, albeit a version that the artist has rendered fantastically, subjectively, using the sort of cartography he's evolved from road maps: the bright color-coding, the labels of graduated weight reflecting size or influence, lines of demarcation sanctifying political boundaries, other lines charting the myriad routes of transportation.

In his comprehensive exhibition 'States of America,' now on display at the Austin Museum of Art, Lordy Rodriguez has it all mapped out.

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