GISELA COLÓN

JOHN LAUTNER SALKIN HOUSE
Echo Park, Los Angeles, California
LUMINOUS EARTH
Curated by Peter Blake
October 2 - November 3, 2025
 

Luminous Earth, is a site-specific sculptural installation created by Puerto Rican-American artist Gisela Colón, responding to the modernist architecture of the John Lautner Salkin residence (1948) and its surrounding natural environment. Drawing on ancient symbolism and futuristic aesthetics, the installation presents interwoven landscape activations featuring a series of monolithic structures and elliptical earthworks, creating a cohesive meditation on place, memory, and belonging.

 

Colón’s practice bridges various art historical currents—from Minimalism and Land Art to the Light and Space movement—filtered through her unique organic approach to material and form. At the heart of Luminous Earth stands Parabolic Monolith (Mercurio Limonita, Cavernas de Camuy, Noroeste de Puerto Rico), 2025, a large-scale radiant ochre sculpture informed by the rich geological minerality of the Camuy Caves in Puerto Rico. With its aerodynamic contours, the singular form suggests both projectile and mountain, spacecraft and obelisk, evoking dualities of force and endurance, presence and memory. This tension speaks to Colón’s lived experience in Puerto Rico, a landscape marked by both natural beauty and complex histories. Surrounding the monolith, a constellation of hewn onyx, quartz, and basalt stones sourced from California deserts appear to spiral in timeless motion. By blending aspects of the luminous expanses of Western America with the geological richness of Puerto Rico, Colón’s work creates a symbiotic relationship between light, mineral, and body, expanding traditional notions of place and belonging.

  

Interspersed throughout the meandering landscape lies a trilogy of Ellipsoidal Earthworks (2025), composed of geological earth matter held inside sculpted elliptical basins carved from Caribbean balsa wood. The elliptical form itself—a primordial, cosmic shape central to Colón's organic sculptural lexicon—grounds the installation in both personal and planetary time. Filled with mineral-rich granite, quartzite rocks, and banded-calcite onyx marbles collected from the deserts of the West—these igneous and sedimentary volcanic materials link tectonic plates across the globe—evoking a primeval force that transcends borders and connects distant geographies through a shared, ancient mineral memory. 

 

Two Quantum Dome hybrid sculptures punctuate the verdant landscape with their mysterious primal form and material polarity. Quantum Dome (Oro Mercurio), 2025, erupts from a rough-cut oval block of travertine, while Quantum Dome (Fosforescente), flows from an asymmetrical white carrara marble cube, activating a dichotomy of time and place, past and future, earth and cosmos. Rooted in autobiography, the form of the dome echoes the mineral accumulations and generative land formations of Colón’s ancestral land, while also referencing the seismic forces of California’s mountainous geology, reflecting the varied geographies that have shaped the artist’s life and practice.

 

Fusing futuristic aesthetics with ancient stone and elemental earth, Colón evokes a tension between permanence and ephemerality, the planetary and the cosmic, the grounded and the infinite. Luminous Earth becomes not just a sculptural installation but a layered inquiry into the intersections of land, memory, and identity. Geology becomes biography, and form becomes a vessel for ancestral and environmental resonance.