It’s a hot, California autumn day when I make the trek out to a Los Angeles valley to meet the second-generation Light and Space artist, Gisela Colón. Her studio, located in an industrial park, is a warehouse space, once home to a plastic manufacturer and a befitting locale for an artist whose preferred medium is poured acrylic. The drive through a never-ending maze of brown hillsides and gray concrete only magnifies the beauty of Colón’s recent “Pods” series— nebulous, shimmering, and colorful “nonobject” works that traverse the sensation between a solid and a liquid. The doors to the warehouse are wide open, and the embalming warmth acts as a contrast to the aloofness of a single pod staged on a side wall. Amoeba-like, shiny, displaying a pleasing iridescent charade of color, Colón’s “Pods” take on an amorphous quality. They feel primal and molecular, like the starting point of all life, at once singularly beautiful and yet indistinguishable in their form, even as their colors continually change depending on viewpoint and surrounding light. I almost expect this pod to slither off outside, where it will simply evaporate under the heat of the afternoon sun. Following the success of Colón’s recent gallery exhibitions in Houston, San Diego, and Los Angeles, and half-a-dozen museum shows (including at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, earlier this year and several upcoming in the U.S. and Germany) …see the entire article in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
