The calming powers of alien pods
Editor’s note: Molly Glentzer, the Chronicle’s ever-busy, nearly omnipresent arts writer, posts regular examinations of singular art pieces. Here is one such post. Read more at houstonchronicle.com/graymatters.
The piece: “Mega Rectanglopoid (Gold)”
The artist: Gisela Colon
Where: McClain Gallery, through June 17
Why: It looks like it could burst and give birth to an alien at any second, though the heavenly color that emanates from one of Gisela Colon’s big, luminous pods hints at more peaceful intentions.
“Mega Rectanglopoid (Gold)” is one of nine minimalist sculptures made of blow-molded acrylic in the Los Angeles artist’s first solo show at McClain. Each of these pieces stretches a basic Euclidean geometric form into something vaguely biomorphic, with a silver or gold “bubble” floating near the surface in a sea of pastel colors that change as viewers walk around them. No lights are involved. When the gallery’s track lights are turned off, the pods still glow, albeit less dramatically, in the available daylight.
In a video made for the gallery, Colon explains that these objects are about giving viewers a moment to be in their own minds, “to just be present and have clarity.”
Her most recent piece, “Untitled (Monolith White),” stands 12 feet tall in the middle of the gallery, under the big skylight. An experiment with a different material — engineered aerospace composite — it projects a more assertive, pure poetry.
Is it phallic? A huge feminine hygiene product? A bullet? An escape hatch that might take you to whatever world the pods came from?
Colon doesn’t care to transmit information with her art — there’s nothing to “get” about it, other than the idea of pure energy she might be sharing.
Gallery manager Anna Farrow said the artist made the monolith as a way to bring the “bubbles” inside the pods out into the air. Perhaps one should spend a little more time clearing the head with the hanging pieces before contemplating it.