Ecstatic Personas

Shannon Alonzo, Jiha Moon, and Carlos Rosales-Silva create characters who embody a sense of transcendence. The exuberant happiness expressed by personas in their paintings and sculptures transgresses boundaries as they dance on the edge of satire, defiance, or madness. Some of their figures laugh or smile, with hands and feet expressing their feelings, while some creatures are more abstract with their attitudes built from shapes and colors. Over the last five years, these artists have critically engaged with the transformative power of joy, modeling effective methods for navigating some of life’s most pressing issues.

This exhibition is inspired, in part, by esteemed Kentuckian bell hooks’s meditations on writing and rapture, and her realization that “the root understanding of the word ecstasy— ‘to stand outside’—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.” The artworks on view invite us to lose ourselves in a new state of being. These characters ask us to adopt a playful state of mind that bounces across cultural touchstones with wild abandon.

Shannon Alonzo’s sculptures celebrate female masqueraders, who performatively reinvent themselves in carnivals as they rejoice in their Caribbean ancestries. Alonzo creates immersive environments often constructed from vibrant textiles in her studio on the island of Trinidad and Tobago. Jiha Moon’s ceramic works have individuated personalities infused with aesthetic references to ancient Korean traditions, pop culture, and Southern charm. Moon calls herself a “cartographer of cultures” and draws on her experiences living in South Korea and the southern United States. Carlos Rosales-Silva’s paintings made of glass beads, crushed stones, and acrylics take on lives of their own. He was born on the border of Mexico and the United States, where many creatives follow a nahual, or guiding spirit, that allows them to shift contexts and cultures fluidly as he does between traditions of modern geometric abstraction and Mesoamerican figurines. The ecstacy conveyed in all their artworks breaks down any subject/object duality and opens up space for profound freedom.