Portal of Healing: Crossing the Bridge Together: Solo show featuring Rachel Gonzales | Rice University, TX
Created from the end of the tumultuous year of 2020 to an uncertain beginning of 2021, “Portal of Healing” is a site-specific custom piece in collaboration with the Houston Asian American Archive with excerpts from Asian American narratives and poetry of Wei-Huan Chen and Jenah Maravilla. A work to hold space for human experiences to “cross the bridge together” to 2021 (quoted from the artist’s late father), spans across the entire space of Information Commons. It is an emotional landscape that literally serves as a bridge from one end of the gallery to another, enveloping the space for contemplation, while figuratively connecting past, present, and future through the storytelling of Asian American narratives melded with the artist’s own visual artistry.
“Portal of Healing” is an experiential work of art, a traversal gateway, and a sanctuary for prayer and meditation. Calligraphically inscribed words and poems levitate, echo, and resonate with the gestural brushstrokes made by the artist. Voices they spoke through the
With acrylic and pencil on unprimed canvases, paired using a minimal color, Gonzales’s oversized gestural mark-making intuitively pays homage to the classical Asian landscape scrolls and calligraphic strokes, with the freehand brushwork giving in to layers of black and white, achieved with the use of one color of paint. By claiming the “female gaze” in her own terms, Gonzales contests tradition with intuition and empathy, challenges us to see beyond the physical realm.
About the Artist
Rachel Gonzales (b. 1986, Massachusetts) is a Filipina-American figurative and abstract contemporary visual artist educated and experienced in both architecture and fine art. She graduated from Rice University with a Bachelor's in Architecture in 2010. Informed by her architectural background in designing physical spaces, her paintings also serve as containers or portals for the human experience and focus on reclaiming “the female gaze” as a more profound way to see beyond the form. Gonzales works mostly with acrylic on canvas, watercolor on paper, and ink or chalk on paper. Working in both abstract and figurative spaces, she pays homage to the abstract contemporary reminiscent of Cy Twombly's "romantic symbolism," with intentional mark-making and fused words with drips of color that fade like a fleeting memory. Her figurative works capture the essence of a person and the subject instilled with a gaze of their own.
