Nationality American | Known for Sculpture | |
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Born 1966 Vancouver, Canada Awards Harry S. Truman Scholarship Award Harry S. Truman Scholarship Education Southwestern Law School, Bachelor of Arts, University of Puerto Rico | ||
Gisela Colon (born 1966) is a Canadian-born, American artist best known for meticulously creating glowing iridescent wall sculptures through a proprietary fabrication process of blow-molding acrylic. She is one of the few women working in the Light and Space and Finish/Fetish movements. Recognized as a successor and legatee of California Minimalism and the Light and Space movements, Colon has exhibited her work alongside veterans of these movements such as Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse. Her use of color, shapes and internal layering is considered "assertively feminist," and "grounded in Minimalism." Her work has been compared to earlier male artists like Craig Kaufman, Dewain Valentine, Doug Wheeler, and Peter Alexander for her use of materials and light as medium; however, as pointed out in ArtForum, "Colon’s labors are very much her own...Her employ of industrial materials and techniques thus structurally redoubles an earlier industry-driven technophilia, even as she eschews her predecessor’s penchant for outsourcing production."
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Gisela colon hyper minimal
Early life and education
Colon was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1966 to a German mother and Puerto Rican father. Her mother was a painter who studied languages and art at the University of Edmonton, Alberta, and her father was a scientist who obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. She was raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico since the age of one, and attended the University of Puerto Rico, graduating magna cum laude in 1987 with a BA in Economics, after receiving a 1986 Congressional Scholarship Award by the Harry S. Truman Foundation in recognition of her outstanding academic excellence. Colon moved to Los Angeles in 1987 to pursue graduate studies, receiving a Juris Doctorate degree from the Southwestern University School of Law in 1990.
Early work
Colon began her career as a painter, exhibiting abstract works from 2005 through 2011. Colon’s early influences, which germinated from her Latin American upbringing in Puerto Rico, include Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesus Rafael Soto, amongst others. Her paintings also showed the influences of artists associated with "Light and Space" in Los Angeles such as Ron Davis and Craig Kauffman. In 2012, Colon moved away from painting into sculpture, focusing on perceptual phenomena, an interest she shares with other members of the Los Angeles-based Light and Space movement, such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Craig Kauffman, DeWain Valentine, Helen Pashgian, Larry Bell, Ronald Davis, Mary Corse and Peter Alexander. Colon’s friendship with mentor De Wain Valentine, and the writings of Donald Judd and Robert Irwin, generated a conceptual shift in her work increasing her interest in issues of visual perception and materiality, which led to the creation of her plastic sculptures body of work.
Current work
In 2012, Colon began working with plastics, developing a unique fabrication process of blow-molding and layering various acrylic materials. This industrial process creates acrylic sculptures that appear to emanate light and color from within, however this is only an illusion based on color and form, as utilized and manifested by the artist.
The Pods shift color before the viewers' eyes depending on lighting, and the viewers’ choice of location.
In describing Colon’s work in the historical context of California Minimalism and Light & Space movements, critic Dr. Suzanne Hudson states, "Colon’s 'Glo-Pods,’ 2013—, irregularly shaped wall mounted acrylic orbs, recall the languid organicism of Craig Kauffman’s candy-colored bubbles; their intimation of light emanating from within the impossibly smooth contours additionally channels Helen Pashgian’s illuminated monoliths. Unlike Pashgian’s plinths, or Doug Wheeler’s neon-backlit canvases, Colon’s scarab-like objects achieve their iridescence via the play of natural light, yet the sculptures appear to change color as one moves around them, as if lit by multihued bulbs.Perhaps more to the broader point, Colon’s labors are very much her own…”
Art critic Mat Gleason explained: "Rather than have some technological trick embedded into the art, [Colon] has made objects that are altered by the world around them yet never stop being themselves. This artist has thus delivered a meditation on the flexibility of the feminine as antidote to the rigidity of the masculine."
Critic Steven Biller has stated that: “Without question, Colon’s approach to shaping, forming, and coloring is advancing the trajectory of the resurgent Light and Space / Finish Fetish movement.”
In her essay “Notes, Thoughts, Observations Towards the Development, Conceptualization and Creation of Non-Specific Objects,” Colon refers to her plastic sculptures "non-specific objects," further explaining, that “Non-Specificity [is] a quality brought about by the inherent mutability of the object.”
Art writer and biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp describes this phenomena: “When the most recent iterations of the Glo-Pods are mounted on a white wall, the 'inherent mutability,' so desired as an effect by Colon, is indisputable. Depending on the combination of artificial and natural lighting, the colors slip and slide like an oil slick on water. Further alterations are apparent as a viewer approaches the work. Among the many shifts, in a single work, pale aqua can turn to lavender and appear to melt within the form. At close proximity, the focus shifts to the frosty surface, as though one were looking through a white cocoon to the pupa within. At a greater distance, the pupa can seem to vibrate with the growing intensity of its perceived colors. There is no there, there: no singular location in which one can grasp all the implications of a single work."
Colon's technologically innovative sculptures led to her to being named one of “The Most Powerful Women in LA’s Arts Scene” in June 2015, identifying her as part of the new cultural vanguard in Los Angeles. In May 2016, Colon was identified as an "Art Star" in issue 113 of Coagula Magazine, and her portrait by Eric Minh Swenson was included in the Art Star exhibition at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster.