Frances Gallardo

Text by Gisela Carbonell

Curator, Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, FL

The works on view here belong to the Hurricane Series, a body of work Gallardo has been developing since 2009 that explores hurricanes as natural, cultural, and historical events. Satellite imagery informs each piece, which Gallardo transforms into a poetic and delicate object. After countless hours of observation and research of the images and animations in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) digital archive, the artist creates a sort of portrait for each of the hurricanes, capturing through texture, form, and color their characteristics, structure, and movement. The vibrancy of pieces like “Carmen” and “Gabriel“ complement the subtleties in works like “Eugenio” and “Cynthia.” In The Unnamed (hurricane tracks), also on view here, Gallardo employs embroidery as a technique to trace the path of unnamed hurricanes going back several decades. Using different colors to evoke the representations used in contemporary digital models, this piece, along with the cut paper works, emphasize the overwhelming beauty in the forces of nature, something the artist has been drawn to from an early age. As Gallardo explains: "Growing up in the Caribbean fostered an inevitable interest in hurricanes in me. Throughout their trajectory, they pull the atmosphere like a colossal spinning skirt, leave traces of choreographies on the landscape, and relay a distinct cadence in the economic, social, and political fabric of the islands."

Text by Gisela Carbonell

Curator, Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, FL

This series of drawings explore visual elements of sandstorms that travel across the Atlantic ocean from the Sahara Desert into the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas. Several tons of particles form dust clouds settle across the region covering the landscape with an ephemeral golden hue to a blurring effect. The phenomenon, which started being formally researched by scientists and experts in the 1970s, transforms the scenery into an environment that is at once familiar and unknown. For this project, Gallardo collected dust samples in Puerto Rico, which she then took to Cornell University’s Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory to have them examined at nanoscopic scale. The digital images she composes as the result of this process are then arranged on a grid and etched on paper with a laser cutter. The series’ ethereal quality evokes the transient and quiet nature of the dust clouds and their subdued radiance as they move through the air.

Orlando, FL, 2021

Presented as part of Sofía Reeser del Río’s ongoing curatorial project Localidad Alterna/Alternate Location III for MECANISMOS, Meca Art Fair, San Juan, PR.

Installation presented along Zaida Goveo Balmaseda’s work, as seen in last image.

Related links:

At MECA Art Fair, A Feeling of Coming Together, By Sebastián Meltz-Collazo for Garage Magazine.

Murmuration, (Mosquito cloud), 2017, 6 ft diameter, installation of laser cut paper pinned on wall.

MFA Thesis Exhibition, 2016, 49 ft x 19 ft x 6 ft (variable heights). Aluminum, cut vinyl, latex paint. Olive Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University. Photos: Luca Spano

“Line to Line”, 2019

“Line to Line” is a site specific public artwork located on the 14th Ave bridge of the City of Mount Vernon, New York, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design and fabricated by Milgo Bufkin.

The 12 black powder-coated aluminum panels depict an abstract collage of woven maps based on the blueprints of Mount Vernon’s original planning, grid structure of city land plots and satellite views, creating an intricate lace-like pattern. The lines interconnect and overlap elements of the city and the lines of the train tracks below the bridge.

Photos by: Jason Mandella

(Last image: Frances Gallardo)

3-5 ft x 32 ft, cut paper, collage, ink and graphite on wall. Marble sculpture design by Frances Gallardo, executed by Ramón Berríos.

 Photos: Félix De Portu Bravo

Meteoro

2012, solo exhibition curated by Elvis Fuentes. Arsenal de la Marina Española, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Photos: Félix De Portu Bravo.

Related links:

Exhibition catalog - Texts by Ingrid M. Jiménez and Elvis Fuentes.

Hurricane soundscape, 2012

Sound design in collaboration with Epic Jefferson.

Interactive sound installation. Box: 15 in x 16 in x 8 in, Discs: 13 in diameter, Table: 18 in x 48 in x 30 in. Wood, cut paper, mother of pearl, motor, Arduino microcontroler, photosensors, speakers.

Produced with crowdfunding thanks to the Cisneros-Fontanals Foundation's 'Fund-a-project' initiative and Special Commission funds from the III Poly/Graphic Triennial of San Juan.

This project was created in the context of Latin American Roaming Art (LARA) Residency, Panama City Edition, curated by Gerardo Mosquera and supported/organized by Asiaciti Trust.

The residency’s capstone exhibition took place in 2017, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panama City, Panama.

Excerpt from LARA 2017 catalogue essay, Oh, wie schön ist Panama!, by Gerardo Mosquera:

[English]

“Frances Gallardo drew on Panama’s imposing skyline for one of the finely laser-etched elements in different materials for her work Terramóvil. The small, delicate components “invaded” the museum, spreading outward irregularly through different spaces, including the landing of the stairway and a hallway, where they appeared as if by surprise. Gallardo digitally mixed photographs of the buildings with organic forms of lichens, motivated by the primitive flora that she saw on her visit to Fort San Lorenzo, as well as by the foliage on Cerro Ancón, and she beautifully marked these hybrid forms. She also did so with old urban maps of the Canal Zone, taken from documents held at the Biblioteca Roberto F. Chiari, which the artists visited, and to which she returned during a second trip to Panama. In this subtly refined piece, Gallardo invented morphologies that synthesized nature, architecture and history, and she scattered them on the walls as if at random, activating them semantically”.

[Español]

“Frances Gallardo se basó en el imponente skyline de Panamá para uno de los elementos finamente calados con láser en distintos materiales de su obra Terramóvil. Los pequeños y delicados componentes “invadieron” el museo, expandiéndose de modo irregular por distintos espacios, incluidos el rellano de la escalera y un corredor, donde aparecían como por sorpresa. Gallardo mezcló digitalmente fotos de los edificios con formas orgánicas de líquenes, motivada por la flora primitiva que vio en su visita al Fuerte San Lorenzo, así como por las frondas en el Cerro Ancón, y caló bellamente estas formas híbridas. Lo hizo además con mapas urbanos antiguos de la Zona del Canal, tomadas de los documentos atesorados en la Biblioteca Roberto F. Chiari, que visitaron los artistas, y a la que ella regresó en una segunda estancia en Panamá. En su obra, de una sutileza refinada, Gallardo inventó morfologías que sintetizaron naturaleza, construcción e historia, y las esparció por las paredes como al azar, activándolas semánticamente.”

“Winds don’t stop” is the result of my participation in the 4th edition of the regional residency Caribbean Linked, which took place at Ateliers ’89 in Oranjestad, Aruba from August 1 through 23, 2016.

Related links:

David Knight Jr. on Puerto Rican artist Frances Gallardo

Excerpt:

“Gallardo settled on drawing as the art form that would be central to her Caribbean Linked works. This was drawing of the automatic, unconstrained kind in which the forms on paper revealed themselves through a process of accumulation and repetition. The building blocks of these forms were oval shapes of varying sizes, resembling fish scales or the patterns found in dead coral. But more relevant to environmental context was the process itself, which produced island-like forms with an eroded, often unfinished appearance. It was in the exhibition space during the installation process that Gallardo began to piece together these drawings to map unexpected linkages and associations, a process that mirrored much of what had occurred at the personal level among Caribbean Linked IV’s residents over the previous three weeks”.

David Knight Jr.

Artist text - “Time flies”

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From the CL website:

“Caribbean Linked is a regional residency and exhibition organized by Ateliers ’89 Foundation in collaboration with ARC Inc. and The Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. It is a crucial space for building awareness across disparate creative communities by bringing together emerging artists from Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic and Dutch Antillean Caribbean islands”.

2019, 7 ft diameter, laser-cut paper wall drawing, dressmaker pins.