Curating and Project Direction

Helix Gallery presents Iris Crepusculos y Pupilas Madrugadas (Twilight Eyes & Dawn Pupils), a solo installation by Brooklyn-based Quipucamayoc artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. Known for her work blending indigenous American, Caribbean and African diasporic doula, griot, quipucamayoc and botanica rituals, Rodriguez Meyer draws on critically endangered embodied wisdom to mend medical wounds across bonded ancestries, geographies, bondaged diasporas, genders and generations.

For her site-specific installation, Rodriguez Meyer has transformed the gallery’s white institutional walls into fabric-cradled, fertile dwellings, integrating reproductive and climate justice healing strategies through documentary sculpture, photography and painting.

The installation features two of Rodriguez Meyer’s Mother Mold monuments, pregnancy casts made with workshop participants in the artist’s prior Mama Spa Botanica workshops (2018-present). To create the sculptures, Rodriguez Meyer cast the torsos of pregnant participants using a combination of silicone, plaster and discarded materials including latex gloves, birth control pill and abortion pill packaging, human hair, fingernail clippings, nail salon glitter, serapes, hair or fruit nets, and environmental ephemera such as palm fronds, funerary flowers, and coral collected after tropical storms. Conceived as fertility effigies, the resulting sculptures honor frontline survivors of the dual reproductive health and climate crisis in the U.S.

Fissure (Linea Negra series) Polyptych, 2018, a series of nine photographs, documents the pregnancy cast process behind the Mother Mold monuments. Olympic (Coralina Entre la Puta y la Santa 1864-2018), 2018, a documentary photograph, depicts the artist in a hospital bed, dilated eight centimeters while in labor at a Miami hospital during a tropical storm.

For her project at Helix Gallery, Rodriguez Meyer’s responds to the city of Philadelphia’s history as one of “founding fathers” in medicine. She engages the university’s textile and medical histories, making visual references to The Gross Clinic, 1875, a painting by artist Thomas Eakins of an operation by Dr. Samuel Gross, famed for its realistic depiction of surgery.

Born in a car in an Everglades swamp, and raised between Homestead, Florida, and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed-race indigenous Andean American (Muisca/Inca), Brooklyn and Miami-based Quipucamayoc artist, archive digger, architect and advocate. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, Coralina has collaborated with reproductive justice and climate leaders while working in installation, photography, sculpture, architecture and academia. Coralina founded Abra Studio in 2005, is a professor at Pratt, a visiting lecturer at University of Maryland and resident of Ankhlave Arts Alliance NYC. She is a founding board member of Menstrual Market, ¡Solar Libre!, Retreet America and advocate for Urban Greenworks Liberty City. They studied painting at MICA and anthropology at Hopkins and hold a BFA in Architecture from Parsons and MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College. Rodriguez Meyer received awards from National Latino Arts & Culture, VSA Kennedy Center, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA and Young Arts. She was a resident of the Bronx Museum AIM program and Miami Dade College. She was a research fellow at Museo Machu Picchu Peru, Syracuse University Florence, Artist’s Institute NYC and Universität der Künste Berlin, studying Nazi utopian urban design with Hito Steyerl. Coralina taught at Florida International University and has been a guest critic at University of Miami, Parsons and Hunter CUNY. Rodriguez Meyer has exhibited at Queens Museum, PAMM, Smithsonian, Kunsthaus Brethanien Berlin, Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum, CAC New Orleans. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, London Review of Books and The Washington Post.