TEORÍAS CASERAS SOBRE UNA ISLA FLOTANTE
Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez

Opening Reception: Friday, March 1, 2024| 6-9pm | Free-To-Attend

Presented in Gallery Two

About The Exhibition

Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez’s Isla flotante (Floating Island) points to Puerto Rico as a place that’s always in motion, shaping a landscape composed of people who are in a directly proportional, waving state of flux. The piece opens with a phone conversation between Roca and their cousin– in which she recalls their father’s observation that PR moves a few centimeters every day– contextualizing this diasporic reality in which citizens are drifting in and out of this shifting tectonic plate. The only constant is change, making the intention to be present difficult and feeling control even impossible. But the installation offers a chance to project into the future while holding the cards we have been dealt. In the wake of a series of earthquakes that shook the southwest region of the island, Roca’s grandmother shares that if they were indeed on a floating island, she “…would have to follow and match it, not do anything and let it take her where it wants to” (all while Shaleyka, the artist’s niece and the youngest family member, plays with dominoes: stacking and transforming its shape, just as the land metamorphizes). Informed by their queer experience and the possibilities that can arise from its abstraction, they utilize speculative fiction as a narrative opening, inviting audiences into their nuclear family’s home as the foundation to hold on to and observe from. Roca facilitates their grandmother, grandfather, and 10-year-old nephew’s perspectives as they reflect on the losses and struggles they face while reimagining the future of this floating island as it continues to be shaped by economic mishandling, political corruption, and natural disasters. Isla flotante reminds us that our hope can be anchored in the complex realities we face, knowing that we can envision a better place before it sinks back into the ocean.

About The Artist

Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez is a multidisciplinary maker and educator working in collaboration with their family. With the use of multimedia installation and live plants, their work examines intimacy, family narratives, Cuir (Queer) Ecology, and how we carry the land’s inherited colonial structures through personal imaginaries and the dualities of the everyday.They have been awarded numerous residencies, including the University of the Arts iLAB residency, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Bemis Centre for Contemporary Arts, and Feminist Art Collective Artscape. Their work has been screened or exhibited internationally including at Taller Comunidad La Goyco (San Juan), Temple Contemporary (Philadelphia), as part of Caribbean selected screening at Documenta Fifteen (Kassel), and Hessel Museum of Art (New York).