GISELA COLÓN

EFRAÍN LÓPEZ

MOUNTAINS ARE INSIDE ME 

April 30 - June 22, 2024

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

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Efraín López is pleased to announce Mountains Are Inside Me, an exhibition of new works by Puerto Rican-American sculptor, Gisela Colón. The exhibition will be on view from April 30 through June 22, 2024 in Tribeca. For her first solo show at the gallery, the artist will present two new sculptural works alongside an early painting, a suite of intimately-scaled works on paper, and an architectural intervention. Mountains Are Inside Me will be accompanied by an essay authored by curator César García-Alvarez.

 

Gisela Colón’s sculptural practice explores identity, transformation, energy, time, and space. Her work is grounded in minimal organic aesthetics that refuse stasis, and instead embrace transformation and transcendence. Throughout her practice, Colón employs strategies of abstraction to both subsume and conceal the complexities of identity and personal narrative. Her work crosses geographic, political, and national boundaries, to form multicultural dialogues and create space for Latinx voices.

 

Contextualizing the origin of the monolithic form, the presentation opens with an early painting titled Pinnacle (El Yunque), 1996. Conjured from her observations and experiences in El Yunque, the tropical rainforest of her homeland in Puerto Rico, this work marks the first appearance of the monolithic structure that has become the principal occupation of Colón’s work. The artist’s use of abstraction and universal geometries belies an alternate reality shaped by complex diasporic conditions. Colon’s monoliths simultaneously evoke the fraught collective history of militarized colonialism in the Caribbean and draw upon her own layered experiences with gun violence. Shaped by a process of healing and transformation, the soaring verticality of the monoliths reflects the mountainous peaks of Puerto Rico’s captivating geology, an enduring source of materia prima for the artist.

 

Anchoring the main exhibition space, Tierra De Substrato Arecibo (Parabolic Monolith Hematite), builds upon Colón’s distinctive organic minimalist language while further elucidating her personal history and often-illegible identity as a diasporic Puerto Rican artist. In Tierra De Substrato Arecibo (Parabolic Monolith Hematite), Colón's use of red earth from her family’s plot of land in Arecibo connects formative moments of a childhood surrounded by violence and displacement to an early fascination with outer space and the cosmos nurtured at the Observatory de Arecibo—until recently the largest telescope in the world. A deeply personal work, Tierra De Substrato Arecibo (Parabolic Monolith Hematite), is the bedrock that lies beneath the artist’s own biographical story, concealed within layers calcified by the broader implications of Puerto Rico's stratified history with colonialism. The distinctive ochre color of Puerto Rico’s red earth comes from the mineral hematite, an iron oxide formed over time. Hematite, one of the earliest pigments used by man, appears in ancient cave drawings throughout the world, as well as on other planetary bodies. In Tierra De Substrato Arecibo (Parabolic Monolith Hematite), Colón constructs a vessel that imagines an expansive cosmic world filled with the energy of nature, ancestral memories, and a universal consciousness larger than any single individual. In imagining this vast expanse of space and time, subjective lived experiences on a human scale are absorbed into the universal, infinite form of the monolith—a structure shared across time by geological formations, prehistoric archeological structures, and ancient architectures. Colón’s larger-than-life totemic structure encapsulates a transformative moment in time, where the complexities of an infinite cosmos, composed of cosmic matter and energy, swirl within its confines.

 

While rooted in Colón’s personal relationship to land and encounters with violence, Tierra De Substrato Arecibo (Parabolic Monolith Hematite) works to absorb the specificities of individualized negative experiences to form a transformative vessel of healing, light, and life. In this work, Colón has invited us to consider what lies beneath the surface and sits within the infinite potentiality of the cosmic world, grounded in the raw dirt that bore ancestral life on earth.