



Gisela Colón
228.6 × 106.7 × 30.5 cm
Further images
Colón approaches her sculptural practice from the expansive perspective of phenomenological concerns: addressing the physical laws of the universe such as gravity, time, movement, energy and transformation. Colón’s practice of Organic Minimalism simultaneously expands and challenges the legacies of Light and Space, Minimalism, Kinetic and Latin American Op Art, merging industrial inertness with transformative biological mutability. Her sensual, gender-ambiguous sculptural forms further connect her practice to a history of female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Linda Benglis and Judy Chicago.
Colón's iridescent molded acrylic wall-mounted biometric pods have a mysterious life force conjuring the ancient divine feminine and the sci-fi future. Her luminous rounded forms cast in multiple layers of optical plastic create the effect of being lit from within and change color depending on a viewer’s vantage point.
"Such attempts are often repeated in relation to the art of Gisela Colón, whose engaged “reaction to” (the artist’s words) and personal relation with such movements as Minimalism and Light and Space, have occluded other elements of her practice – including the perspective of landscape. Born in Canada, yet raised in Puerto Rico and now based in California, the artist has cited the jungle and desert as influences for her so-called “Non-Specific Objects.” Materially and perceptually, her blow-molded acrylic sculptural forms draw from both the terrestrial and celestial, including the phosphorescent waters of Puerto Rico’s bioluminescent bays; the mounds and climbing vegetation of El Yunque rainforest; the astronomical visions of The Arecibo Observatory; and the vast vistas of Southern California. Characterized by their chromatic shifts, Colón’s artworks create landscapes that do not stay put, but rather move and shift with the viewer to embody a sense of multi-positional (diasporic?) relationality."– Susanna V. Temkin, PhD