At the Bruce Museum, Gisela Colón: Radiant Earth presents a delicate yet potent meditation on matter, light, and the latent intelligence of the natural world. Colón’s sculptures, invading our space as iridescent monoliths and biomorphic forms, stand with the poise of sentinels. At once technological and elemental, their surfaces refract color as if drawing breath from the surrounding atmosphere. Rooted in the artist’s childhood experiences of Puerto Rico’s lush topography and carried forward through the vast geological horizons of California, the exhibition situates light not as spectacle, but as a carrier of memory, time, and planetary consciousness.
The towering Parabolic Monoliths and Pods recall ancient totems and obelisks, their internal chromatic currents seemingly in slow geological motion. Though fabricated from advanced resins, carbon fiber, and dichroic pigments, they resist the cool detachment of Minimalism. Instead, Colón’s notion of “Organic Minimalism” reclaims these materials for a language of regeneration, aligning scientific precision with ecological reverence. Here, color is not decorative but structural, activated by light; it performs a continual becoming, echoing the processes of erosion, healing, and cellular growth.
Equally compelling is the installation’s grounding in actual earth. For this exhibition, stones of onyx, quartz, and basalt form a central landmass, anchoring the luminous sculptures within a tactile geology that bridges Puerto Rico and the American West. While this gesture risks a degree of literalism, the rough opacity of the stones ultimately sharpens the perceptual intensity of the works, allowing the sculptures’ internal light to read not as a decorative effect but as a slow, elemental force in dialogue with deep time and material density. In works such as Estructura Totémica (Piedras Contra Balas, Humo Supernova Arecibo), layers of pulverized bullets, red soil, desert sand, and cosmic pigment compress histories of colonial violence, migration, and cosmic aspiration into a single vertical axis.
Gisela Colón’s practice, as displayed here under the eye of guest curator Dr. Danielle O’Steen, ultimately proposes sculpture as a site of convergence, where planetary time, personal history, and future-oriented hope coalesce. At the Bruce Museum, Radiant Earth becomes both an exhibition and an environment of attunement, inviting viewers to sense the subtle radiance that binds body, landscape, and cosmos. —Charles Moore
