Jairo Sosa

“There are no unsacred places;/there are only sacred places/ and desecrated places.”

—Wendell Berry, How to be a Poet (to remind myself)

Galerie Timonier is pleased to present a selection of new ceramic works by Jairo Sosa.

In For the Love of the Game, Sosa furthers hi s exploration of memory, loss, ascendence and transcendence through the motif of the basketball. The gallery space is rethought to take on the mantle of an environment that is at once monastic, athletic and exhibitory: the pedestal becomes an altar, where the artist had once used shards of glass or mounts of sand to display the ceramics, here, they are displayed on the the bare floor - reminiscent of a hardwood court - in an almost taxonomic way at various stages of deflation. Their usual ability to take flight has been stripped of them, they are frozen on the ground, mired by their own fragility.

This very fragility which, paradoxically, comes from a tempering through fire is the mediumʼs language: one which represents body and endurance despite precarity. Much like most bodies, it endures cracks, fractures, and ruptures. These entropic, violent events become inscribed in the material itself, forensic remnants like scars. In this respect, Sosaʼs basketballs become more like ontological totems, standing in crystalized states of bereftness. Their collapsed centers preclude trajectory, their concavities become receptacles for pooling rainwater until their very nature shifts and they become vessels.

For its opening, the exhibition articulates 50 butterflies (among which figure Painted Ladies*) which is being released in the gallery space and into New York City. They offer a counterpoint to the permanence of ceramics while evocating another kind of fragility and endurance. Where the former touches on breakage, and vessel-body metaphor, the latter symbolizes resurrection and earned metamorphosis. Unlike birds, most butterfly migrations take multiple generations to complete, the individuals who return north are the great-grandoffspring of those who left. The migration journeys draw on notions of inherited, body-memory which allow tiny, delicate beings to align themselves with invisible planetary forces like magnetics fields and meteorological phenomena to navigate extraordinary distances.

For Sosa, memory acts as the link between death, migration and the body. Its preservation is instrumental through text and the archive. The embedding of textual and printed matter, be it or not his own, is a device he often employs to underscore elements of theory or narrative. Here, Sosa introduces Forty Million Dollar Slaves, The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete by William C. Rhoden and In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez placed on a pedestal-cum-altar. They draw parallels of bodies as battlegrounds and systems of containment and spectacle the artist identifies as main perpetrators in the elevation from and through the specter of violence and/or death all wrapped up under the guise of a game within a larger, more nefarious game.

Jairo Sosa (b. New York City, NY) is a Dominican-American multidisciplinary artist. He lives and works in New York City. He received his B.F.A from the Cooper Union School of Art and his M.F.A from Columbia University. Recent solo exhibitions include: Cue Art Foundation, New York City; Room 3557, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include Kates-Ferri Projects, New York City; Fredric Snitzer Gallery. Miami, FL; At Peace Gallery, New York City; and Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ. Sosa is the current subject of Boomerang at the Cue Art Foundation.