SPACE invites one artist to produce a yearlong series of images for a public-facing billboard located on the east façade of Mercer Union.
Mercer Union’s SPACE billboard groundwork commission has invited artist Ella Gonzales for its 2024–25 season for a yearlong series titled, Sleeve. Gonzales, whose practice engages the endless depth yet impenetrable border of the picture plane, is a painter with a style for soft pigment washes and hard-edged geometries that soothe the eye as much as they tease the mind. The conceptual and technical interests of her works, be they wall-bound or sculptural, are twined in a deeply personal study of migration and diaspora.
Her intuitive and expertly drafted x-rays of built structures invite a dreamlike navigation of spaces, places, and times that remain inconsumable, just slightly out of reach. To these pictorial volumes, Gonzales often adds dimension by using layers, opacities, creases, and folds as an infinitely variable language for orienting to her subject. At Mercer Union, her paintings engage a new form, introducing materials like vinyl and polyethylene as companion surfaces that hold, protect, obscure, and disrupt the composition. Over the course of one year, Sleeve plays with the billboard site by iterating gestures within a single shell. Collapsed organza, Piña and Jusi silks painted with acrylics appear and accumulate, in a slow reveal of three sculptural banners or perhaps, three distinct moments in a single work always in the process of becoming.
Sleeve: as that surface fluctuates is the third edition in the yearlong series, an accompanying text is forthcoming.
The title as that surface fluctuates is borrowed from Lisa Robertson’s essay “The History of Scaffolding,” published in Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), in which she positions scaffolding as a model for inhabiting the in-between; a responsive framework that allows for movement through instability with a poetics of becoming rather than arrival.
Ella Gonzales
