page_title: Gisela Colon
section_title: Pods
hierarchical_section_title: Gisela Colon / Work / Pods
caption_attribution_description: English: Gisela Colon, "Ultra Spheroid (Gold Aqua)", 2017, blow-molded acrylic, 90x42x12 inches, 229x107x33 cm, Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), seen in natural lighting.
context_page_description: Gisela Colon is an American international contemporary artist who has developed a unique vocabulary of "organic minimalism," breathing lifelike qualities into reductive forms. Operating at the intersection of art and science, Colon is best known for meticulously creating light-activated sculptures through industrial and technological processes. Drawing from aerospace and other scientific realms, Colon utilizes innovative sculptural materials such as carbon fiber and optical materials of the 21st century, to generate her energetic sculptures. Colon's gender-fluid sculptures disrupt the traditional view of the masculine minimal object, by embodying qualities of energy, movement and growth, through a merger of industrial with the organic. Oscillating between masculine and feminine, primitive and futuristic, liquid and solid, fecund and phallic, inert and biological, Colon's objects possess a confluence of polarities that take the minimal object to a new frontier.
context_section_description: Colon produces incandescent sculptures generally referred to as "Pods." In 2012 Colon began working with plastics, developing a unique fabrication process of blow-molding and layering various acrylic materials. This industrial process creates dynamic sculptures that fluctuate in appearance, emanating light and color inherently from within. The Pods shift color and form before the viewers' eyes depending on lighting, and the viewers' choice of location. 
  Christopher Knight, art critic for the LA Times writes, "Sleek sculptural objects with misty, mercurial surfaces and at least partial inspiration from aerospace technology have not lost their appeal in more than half a century. In Los Angeles, first there was Craig Kauffman, then Helen Pashgian and now Gisela Colon…..Colon's wall-bound " pods" [are created] in a variety of whimsical, organic shapes — lozenges, softened trapezoids and freeform globules — as if conceived with a kid's giant bubble wand. Most sport a multicolored nucleus made from layers of colored plastics, which glows brightly if mysteriously within the paler milky form."
  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 phenomenon: "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."
caption: Ultra Spheroid (Gold Aqua)", 2017, blow-molded acrylic, 90x42x12 inches, 229x107x33 cm, Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).
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