In O., acclaimed Dominican-American artist Luis Alberto Rodriguez strips back his choreographed, embodied approach to photography in a series exploring life's free fall, the construction of identity and its connections with spiritual destiny. Influenced by French mystical thinker Simone Weil, Rodriguez draws a line between his pared-back portraits and Weil's life's work, seeking purity and the relationship between suffering and transcendence. The title, the letter O, evokes this transcendence: a noise, a gasp, an exhalation, a cycle, all sounds, an open symbol, a zero, a reset.
 
Working with a cast of varied bodies, ages, backgrounds and identities, Rodriguez sculpts a series of nudes that oscillate between power and loss of control. He challenges his subjects to let go: bodies contort and collapse as they return to balance, rise towards grace and reach for purity. How much control do we have over the direction we take? How soft is the landing?
 
Rodriguez places his striking nudes in dialogue with images of tasseography, the practice of divination through reading a coffee cup, rooted in his Dominican heritage. Through this, he engages spiritually with the strength and beauty of those who appear and disappear before his camera. O. evokes the volatility of our present moment, our states of self-preservation and the future to come.