Gisela Colon: Pods

This exhibition features the work of Gisela Colon, and American contemporary artist who has developed a unique vocabulary of organic minimalism, breathing life into reductive forms. Upon entering the gallery, one is surrounded by wall-hung biomorphic forms in multiple glowing hues that seem to transmute, interacting in new and unpredictable ways, with every variation in the room’s illumination and every shift of the viewer’s perspective. Forms within the forms also seem to move and alter. Shaped like amoebae and radiating like gems, the works evoke life both at its most primordial level and, simultaneously, at its most technically advanced and aesthetically refined. The way viewer’s interact with the Pods—by moving around and among them, by drawing closer and stepping back, by observing the differences wrought by variations in sunlight or levels of artificial lighting—is essential to the artist’s aims and the work’s meaning.

Colon is principally concerned, she has said, with “non-linearity, shape-shifting, fluidity, liquidity, temporality, motion”—everything that is contrary to “stasis.” And, indeed, in examining her work one encounters no acute angles, no flat contours, no rough surfaces. The constructivist aspects of Modernism—straight vectors, the grid, uniform modules—are here superseded. Sinuousness, brightness, protozoan shapes, mystery, and opulence prevail. Once engaged with the Pods, the eye and the mind never rest. Everything is flow and change.