I conducted this interview with Gisela Colón on November 19, 2020, just after a mysterious obelisk-like structure was discovered in Utah’s Red Rock Country, and just days before the discovery was announced. Exactly when this crudely bolted, John McCracken-like monolith was initially installed is a mystery. That it was found by state employees counting sheep has been described as the most 2020 thing of 2020. Since then, multiple monoliths of varied fashion have been appearing and disappearing around the world, leading to a magnifying force of everything from commercial opportunists, to alien conspiracy theorists, to a Christian military LARPing crusade. Meanwhile, Gisela has been installing her solo exhibition, EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future, of monolith and rectanguloid sculptures created in quarantine from optical acrylics and aerospace carbon fiber. Her unique sculptural language embodies the way that time expands, retracts and collapses. Her two short films express the anxieties that result from isolation and inertness. Her inquiries into the laws of physics address non-linear time flows and they provide the viewer with a sensory and intellectual experience in the grand cosmic sense of time and space. In essence, these “organic minimal” forms inherently attract a diversified coterie of forces that might point toward all the reasons we could be feeling our fragmented world suddenly culled together by a mysterious ping. click here to read more.
Gisela Colon: Meta Minimal @ Gavlak Los Angeles
Through her syncretic process of exploring and expanding upon past history, sculptor Gisela Colon has succeeded in creating sculptures that convey the fullest possible array of sensory and intellectual experience, projecting cosmic energy and power outwards into the world. With her astute practice of Organic Minimalism– an idiosyncratic sculptural language that imbues life-like qualities into reductive forms– Colon 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. Colon’s oeuvre is the result of a synthesis of pointed historical reflection and visceral raw energy.
Colon’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. By channeling Bourgeois’ notions of sexualized energies and Chicago’s nascent feminist atmospheric works, Colon similarly posits her sculptures as vehicles for conversion of classic masculine forms into feminized power.
Meta Minimal will be on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Gavlak 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery