Borinquen Gallo. Like a Jungle Orchid for a Lovestruck Bee

About

The exhibition features a series of sculptures and a large-scale, immersive installation fashioned from intricately reconstituted street materials, such as yellow and red “caution” tape, construction tarps, garbage bags, discarded hub-caps and debris netting. The show is the inaugural solo exhibition of the artist’s work in New York.

Born in Rome to a Puerto Rican mother and an Italian father, Gallo subsequently spent her formative years living in the Bronx, where she continues to reside and maintains her studio. She trained as a painter, but later gravitated towards the use of unorthodox materials reflective of her local environs. Despite their genesis in humble, disposable materials, Gallo’s totemic sculptures entail soaring, flourishing gestures reminiscent of the classical art and architectural influences to which she was broadly exposed as a child. The works also yield a sense of meditative contemplation and a yearning toward transcendence.

Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid

For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,

Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,

Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent

And vague, swirls in, and on and on…
 

-Tracy K. Smith
My God, Its Full of Stars (2011)