The Broken Ground

Sperone Westwater is pleased to present The Broken Ground, a two-person show featuring Gamaliel Rodríguez and Letha Wilson. Working in drawing and painting, and mixed media sculpture, respectively, both artists utilize the landscape as a point of departure. Taken from the title of a 1964 poem by Wendell Berry, broken ground can be understood as the first step in the creation of something new, as an outcome of either manmade or natural processes. While Rodríguez conjures a sense of mystery and allegory through light and color, Wilson extracts momentary perceptions from the larger world and recasts them within her sculptural practice. Employing a limited palette of blues, ochres and purples, Gamaliel Rodríguez constructs atmospheric landscapes that investigate the legacies of colonialism and industrial development in the Caribbean. Deserted and deteriorating man-made structures such as military bases, religious buildings, airports and schools–buildings that both spatially and symbolically exert power–transition into hybrid forms consumed by vegetal overgrowth. In works such as Orinoco/Topocho en gestación, 2024, and Evolved Cavendish, 2022, Rodríguez considers the inextricable relationship between the economic and ecological, depicting species of now-ubiquitous plants like banana and breadfruit that were initially brought to Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century to feed enslaved people. Emanating beams of light or smoke, the trees are cast “as almost mystical entities [...] prompting a reconsideration of these lifeforms as both agents and witnesses.”[1] Merging photography with industrial materials, Letha Wilson creates a dialogue between natural and built environments. Wilson utilizes photographic prints not as a static record of a place and time, but as a raw material for sculpture. Her practice references a 19th century photographic tradition, which sought to capture a sense of the sublime in the vast natural landscape of the American West. While carrying forth that vision of powerful natural forces at work, Wilson’s rejection of the concept of photography as simply a window to gaze into manifests in the physical encounter of the printed image with poured concrete and steel. Wilson fragments, perforates, compresses, folds and projects her photographs onto irregular surfaces and geometric forms. At times her titles retrace the co-mingling of disparate acts – witnessing and doing – as in Craters of the Moon Fold Back, 2021, and Death Valley Mosaic Canyon Reclaimed Steel, 2020, while others connect places and phenomena, as in Yellowstone Sunrise Idaho Lava, 2021. 1 - Alexandra Méndez García, Independent Curator

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