Gisela Colón. Matéria Prima

Gisela Colón is a Puerto Rican-American contemporary artist whose organic, totemic, light-activated sculptures and monumental environmental installations explore human perception challenging viewers to experience transformation in real time and space. Through an artistic process that employs high-tech materials like optical acrylics and carbon fiber, as well as matter harvested from sites of the artist’s own life, Colón is known for pioneering a language of “organic minimalism” that recalls the energy of the earth, ancestral biological memories, and concepts of time, gravity, and universal forces of nature. Colón’s monoliths invoke bullets, projectiles, and missiles, consequently recalling the fraught history of militarized colonialism in the Caribbean generally, and the artist’s complicated personal experiences with gun violence more particularly. Yet for Colón the monolith in its soaring verticality also echoes the arresting mountainous peaks of Puerto Rico, an enduring source of materia prima for the artist. Employing ecofeminist and decolonial strategies, Colón reconfigures entangled histories into a universal language, transmuting forms of violence, displacement, and death into vessels of healing, light, and life. This monograph is the culmination of 5 years of Land Art projects and a comprehensive survey exhibition at the Museu Nacional da Repùblica in Brazil and its environmental activation of the Monumental Axis in Brasilia the capital of Brazil.