Rafael Delacruz

A corner outside said to me:

“It doesn’t sound like that. It sounds like the wind found something to say and didn’t know.”

An instrument someone plays. A wind meter writes the atmosphere into notation — G major, E minor, glockenspiel marking what the gust decided — while the same air opens and dims a film in the next room, blooming with the weather outside. That film is a document of listening: walking through a city asking people to hear something that isn’t there yet, their ear becoming the footage. A radio drifts across the dial — Irie Storm, Kol Hashalom, New York Kreyòl, Radio Rumba, KALX, Radio Sonidera — captioning a story the image never agreed to with whatever voice happens to be passing through. The subtitles in the footage are real, taken from the air where they were spoken, but the radio de-tunes them anyway, so what’s said and what’s shown keep losing each other mid-sentence. Nearby, paintings are scraped and defused, some framed as houses, as thresholds; erased and in full resolution.

Somewhere, I’m transmitting something on purpose and it’s arriving as something else — a signal sent clean, caught full of weather, static standing in for whatever got lost between the antenna and my ear.

Rafael Delacruz (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in Berkeley, California and New York, New York. He holds a B.A. in Film Theory from San Francisco State University. His exhibitions include CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA, Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA,Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, NY, and Greene Naftali, New York, NY. He has participated in the 2022 Marin Headlands Center for the Arts Artist in Residence program.