PROXYCO Gallery, 121 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002
Project Room (Downstairs)
PROXYCO and Embajada are please to present the three person exhibition GIVE A WAY by artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Gabriella Torres-Ferrer & Yiyo Tirado Rivera.
Departing from this notion and concept ‘to give a way’, the artists ponder the question of how to construct and approach the situation of failed political and social system between Puerto Rico and the U.S. and who benefits from it the most? The three artists in the show are from Puerto Rico and the artworks in this exhibition are political. They mean to shed light on the country’s troublesome relationship with the United States.
This show was organized by PROXYCO and EMBAJADA as an addendum of the show currently on view at The Whitney Museum ‘No Exists un Mundo Poshuracán: Puerto Rican in the Wake of Hurricane Maria’.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist whose work resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Through multiple approaches to documentation and a collaborative research-based practice, she deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives and contests dominant visual culture. Sofía employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. She has been a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute, the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, the Flaherty Seminar and the Annenberg Media Lab at USC, as well as participating in residencies such as Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), FAARA (Uruguay) and Fonderie Darling (Montreal). Her work has been exhibited in Documenta Fifteen, the Whitney Biennial, the Queens Museum, ifa Galerie in Berlin, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and galleries like Km 0.2 and Embajada. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local, dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices.
Gabriella Torres-Ferrer (Puerto Rico, b. 1987) is a multimedia artist and researcher whose practice considers futurability, power dynamics, and means of exchange and production in a globalized networked society. Their transmediale practice integrates new media, installation, video, web-based interventions, and other experimentations. Ferrer’s work has been featured at The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale; A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, New York); Phillip Martin (Los Angeles, CA); Galería CURRO (Guadalajara, Mexico); SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, DE); and Embajada (San Juan, Puerto Rico). Their work has also been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art (with Occupy Museums, 2017), El Museo del Barrio (New York) and the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard (Annandale-on- Hudson, New York, 2022). In 2020, Torres-Ferrer received a guest artist prize from CERN (Geneva) and enrolled in the Akademie Schloss Solitude’s international artist-in-residence fellowship.
Roberto “Yiyo” Tirado (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1990) Graduated in Design and Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts of Puerto Rico. In a general sense, the production of my works is based on territorial studies on the political, symbolic and aesthetic construction of public spaces in Caribbean areas. In specific terms, the analysis model is directed mainly to critical reflection on landscape, architecture and how these concepts are related to the colonial status of Puerto Rico. Under a varied field of disciplines such as sculpture, engraving, painting, photography and installation, work processes are established that put in tension the contemporary forms of colonialism and the different tourist economies that shape the territory at a representational and social level. In 2015 he founded the contemporary art space KM 0.2, with the artist Karlo Andrei Ibarra, with whom he directs said project space located in the Santurce neighborhood. He has exhibited in various institutional spaces and in several countries such as: Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, the United States, Spain and the Dominican Republic. His individual and collective exhibitions include: Tropical Blizz Ball Sale (Recinto Cerra, Puerto Rico) “Caribbean Blues”(Mana Contemporary Miami) “Dislocaciones” (La Liga del Arte, Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico), “Doble Vara” (Casa Quien, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana) y “Hipervisibilidad del paisaje” (Proyecto Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico). Actualemente vive y trabaja en Puerto Rico.