Borinquen Gallo was born in Rome, Italy and lives and works in NYC.
Her sculptures incorporate a variety of materials which include cement, silicone, textiles, cardboard, and paper. Through reconfiguring ordinary or often discarded materials into unexpected combinations, her work addresses a space in which physical, intellectual, and material concerns exist in tension with one another while eliciting a multiplicity of conceptual references. These include the tension between the physical and the technological, the irreproducible and the commercial, the original and the copy, the permanent and the consumable or even the disposable. Themes related to notions of spirituality, scientific progress, mass production, consumerism, and the commodification of the body come to the foreground in many of her installations. Her process is marked by an emphasis on multiples. Through duplicating reproductions of individual human organs and packaging them as if they could be purchased commercially as every-day commodities, the sculptures function as visual metaphors that while avoiding pontificating specific meanings, evoke a multiplicity of references including the commodification of the body and emotions, and the search for what makes us commonly human beings rather than just mere living creatures or even products. The work often combines narratives that are both intimate and common to human nature, thus blurring the line between individual agency and the universality of the human condition. Her focus on the interior concepts of the body points to a larger search in which identity becomes internal, multidimensional, nomadic and transportable, is stripped of its socio-cultural constructs, and is no longer dependent on ideological prescriptions nor relegated to a specific geography.
Artist Bio.