Gisela Colon: Pods
Gisela Colon
(Courtesy: Wikipedia)
GISELA COLON (Canada, b. 1966) was raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico and received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico (1987) and JD from Southwestern University School of Law, Los Angeles (1990). Colon lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Colon began her career as a painter, exhibiting abstract works from 2005 to 2011. In 2012, Colon moved into sculpture, focusing on perceptual phenomena. Colon’s friendship with mentor DeWain Valentine, and the ideas and practices of Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Larry Bell, John McCracken, Doug Wheeler, amongst others, generated a conceptual shift in her work increasing her interest in issues of visual perception, and materiality, which led to the creation of her sculptural bodies of work. Colon's sculptural practice of generating interplay between light, perception, and lucid materiality embodies the ideals and the evolving investigations of the California Light and Space movement.
Colon also has been influenced by Minimalism, particularly the writings and work of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, amongst others. Taking a cue from Donald Judd’s notion of “specific objects,” Colon has dubbed her own works “non-specific objects” to highlight their deliberate fluid indeterminacy.
Originally from Puerto Rico, Colon's work is also the product of cross-cultural influences. Colon identifies the early influence of Latin American artists such as Jesus Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez on her practice. Colon's sculptural work continues a conversation with Latin American geometric modernism and the legacy of OpArt.
Colon is an American contemporary artist who has developed a unique vocabulary of “organic minimalism,” breathing life-like qualities into reductive forms. Colon's oeuvre encompasses several distinct sculptural forms: Pods, Slabs, Monoliths, and Portals. The through-line in all of Colon's work is the concept of the "mutable object;" the sculptures are conceived as variable objects that transmute their physical qualities through fluctuating movement, varied lighting, changing environmental conditions, and the passage of time.