Gaby Collins-Fernandez & Carlos Rosales-Silva: Applied Pressure

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to announce Gaby Collins Fernandez & Carlos Rosales-Silva: Applied Pressure. Applied Pressure is a two-person solo exhibition featuring artists Gaby Collins-Fernandez and Carlos Rosales-Silva. The artists intersect in their experimental uses of color and texture to create abstract works that manipulate images. Collins-Fernandez presents a series of paintings and works on paper using materials such as crayon, digital photo collage, and fabric. Rosales-Silva’s works are grounded in a practice of painting but often borrow from sculptural and installation practices through materials like sand, crushed stone, and glass beads.

Applied Pressure opens on Wednesday, May 18th with an opening reception from 6 to 8 pm. Please contact the gallery for details regarding our opening night reception. To request high-resolution images and more information about this exhibition please contact the gallery at info@ruizhealyart.com or 210-804-2219.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez’s practice concerns skin, texture, and the potential of surfaces. She is a master of textures and of the possible combinations of fabric, paint, and paper. In Lady Painter the artist reenacts Titian’s mythological painting Flaying of Marsyas to confront ideas of justice, authority, and public punishment. The artist states, “The question of pressure and touch becomes important. Such as how the difference between a finger and a knife is sharpnessand material, while a stab and caress is a question of measurement and intent.” On her use of layering and stacking elements Collins-Fernandez says, “As a strategy, it allows me to equalize categories: color, surface, text, gesture, materials - all function as a kind of language within the work.” In Collins-Fernandez’s practice the digital and the corporeal mingle together creating surprising readings.

Carlos Rosales-Silva similarly uses color and material to deconstruct language. He states, “I often travel to the sites where I learned how to see relationships of color, shape, and space. Most often these travels take me to the American Southwest and Mexico where I grew up. I believe the architecture, landscapes, and vernacular cultures of these places are not only beautiful, but unique because they reveal the complex visual histories of colonization that are severely under-recognized in Western Art History.” Works like Cobija and Biblioteca No. 3 are new, large-scale meditations where the elements of a blanket and library are extracted into their most essential and textural forms. The artist explains, “I find abstraction to be a useful tool for navigating the tense states that Brownness often finds itself in.” Rosales-Silva returns to themes like tradition, assimilation, and memory that are often intertwined with Latinx and Mexican American experiences.

About the Artists

Gaby Collins-Fernandez is an artist living and working in New York City. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A.) and the Yale School of Art (M.F.A., Painting/Printmaking). Her work has been shown in the US and internationally. She is a recipient of residencies at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY) The Marble House Project (Dorset, VT), and a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. Collins-Fernandez is also a writer whose texts have appeared in Cultured Magazine, The Miami Rail, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a founder and publisher of the annual magazine Precog, and a co-director of the artist-run art and music initiative BombPop!Up.

Carlos Rosales-Silva is an MFA graduate from New York City’s School of Visual Arts and a participant in Brooklyn’s Residency Unlimited Program. Rosales-Silva was an artist in residence at Artpace, San Antonio in 2018, and an Abrons Art Center, New York, NY Visual Artist AIRspace Resident. His artwork has been part of various exhibitions throughout Texas and the United States, including Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Sadie Halie Projects, Minneapolis, MN; MFA Brown Art, Governors Island, NY; and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE.

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