The Brooklyn Rail

La Montaña, El Monolito, Gisela Colón’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Puerto Rico (MAC), starts at the beginning of at least two universes. The first, the one we all inhabit, explodes into being in the opening moments of a 2023 video work displayed high up on the wall beside the museum gallery’s entrance. We watch as celestial matter spins together, forming the planet Earth and ultimately, the island of Puerto Rico, as American astronauts touch down on the moon. The second is purely Colón’s: a lone oil-on-canvas from 1996, Pinnacle (El Yunque) depicts a towering monolith, an imagined depiction of the titular mountain at its pre-colonial peak and an intervention hinting at a lifetime of work to come, embedded in lush greens that evoke the Indigenous Taíno civilization’s sacred rainforest. What emerges from these two points, nearly thirty years apart, is the result of a singular quest for meaning—both on the part of Colón, who was born in Canada, raised in Puerto Rico, and works in California; and for the island of Puerto Rico as a whole, whose history of extraction and colonization inescapably backgrounds its people’s embrace of the future. In coming home for her first retrospective in the region, Colón unites the land, the light, and the stars to illuminate a place in the universe for herself, the viewer, and the island she grew up on.

Estructura Totémica (Piedras Contra Balas, Bayamón Incandescente) (2022) is the first of four conical monoliths in the gallery’s main space. A mini-monolith atop a striated plinth of varied sediments, with a materials list of aurora particles, stardust, cosmic radiation, and associated cosmic ephemera, glimmers with a brassy hue in its selectively lit corner. If this aerodynamic shape (however projectile-like) could indicate the promise of progress, its base, a careful arrangement of sedimentary layers encased in shatterproof lucite, descends into a complex past: pulverized bullets indicative of street and state violence top natural red clay, sands from the desert of the western United States, and cosmic carbon dust. Colón has a conceptual tendency towards deep time, the understanding that our existence is but a blip in the grander scheme. Here, longstanding trauma from Puerto Rico’s political history is depicted as a permanent, human-sized scar on the history of our planet. Three larger conical monoliths step further into the cosmic, surrounded by dense black sand and hunks of limestone on the floor that evoke an asteroid field in deep space. These three monoliths, in addition to being made of the same celestial substance, each visualize a critical material from Puerto Rico’s ecosystem—hematite, chlorophyll, and algae—as solidified matter, practically glowing in the light as you enter and exit their vicinities. I found myself stunned before Monolito Parabólico Hematita (Tierra De Substrato, Arecibo, Puerto Rico) (2024), which at times seems to contain swirling nebulae and gas clouds forming stars in real time, like those that American scientists attempted to reach via the now-defunct radio telescope at Arecibo.

Three blown acrylic works take the same approach with respect to the shifting nature of light over matter, keenly sensed when surrounded by ocean. In a far corner, Light Portal (Piedra Alabastro) (2025) is a wall-bound doppler-effect simulator, a doorframe-sized slab of hazy-white light that shifts from red to purple to blue as you align your body with its center. Liquid Trapezoid (Rubidium) (2019) evokes plasma or liquified metal as it transitions from sci-fi silver to light pink, while Hyper Ellipsoid (Gold Viridescent) (2019) encases a golden core—a very literal symbol in Puerto Rico and El Yunque’s extractive histories—in vibrant, sunset tones as the light emitting from its center bounces off and away from the metallic mass. If the monoliths’ sense of weight and heft give them an ancient, monumental quality, these works—proudly plastic—have an active sense of ephemeral possibility that hints towards progress, evolution, flux.

The towering Projectile Monolith Iridium (12 Foot Circular Monolith Iridium) (2017) frankly looms. Comprised of aerospace carbon fiber enmeshed with a solidified suspension of dichroic particles, here evoking highly valuable iridium, the Projectile Monolith serves as a contextual and spiritual touchpoint, placing Colón’s fascination with materials science (and the extraction/expansion cycle that represents) in direct conversation with the elusiveness of historic monument-making. The result is entrancing: a glistening, perfectly-smooth parabola that warps and reflects both the viewer’s face and all light it receives from the works preceding it. The Projectile carries an almost alien weight that pulls the viewer into literal orbit as they follow their own reflection around each side. Unlike comparable Light and Space notables—Fred Eversley’s parabolas are an immediate reference point—there is no moment at which one ponders the math that makes the Projectile’s arc and freestanding nature feasible. So too does the vast industrial apparatus that makes this object possible—California’s aerospace economy, Caribbean resource extraction—seem to vanish. Instead, one questions whether it was dropped in via tractor beam or unearthed from some deep cavern at the center of the Earth. I’ve never discovered an ancient monument so outside my understanding as to be obviously sacred, but I have to imagine this is what it feels like—a profound inscrutability you have to force yourself to look away from as you picture this monolith existing one thousand years before and one thousand years after you. Time makes ancient aliens of us all. At the opening, I watched visitors walk in locked rotations around it; on a crowded day that might look like a ritual. A sister monolith (among a handful staged at such sites as the Pyramids of Giza or Riyadh’s AlUla), Ríos De Oro Y Polvo (Parabolic Monolith Aurus Pulvum) (2025) stands guard at El Yunque, as part of last year’s ArteYunque. Catch both, a good day trip, and you can practically see the beam of energy that unites the rainforest’s Edenic abundance and the museum’s hallowed, church-like feel.

That final monolith is there for a reason, and it’s the best place in the room to watch the universe begin again in that first video. Do so, walking back through the MAC’s gallery, maybe even out into its courtyard (the building is a retired schoolhouse, complete with leftover initials scratched on its brick walls) for a breath, and you’ll find yourself feeling an incredible sense of things having happened before you. That’s the psychic terrain Gisela Colón operates on, one that unifies the endless hard material of geography, soil, and matter with the ephemerality and uncertainty of light, space, and time. What sets this practice apart from the easily categorizable—one can see hints of Land art, Light and Space, or Minimalism, and lose them just as quickly—is in how it reaches beyond the present in both directions. History, progress, innovation, and conservation are all carefully aligned in a constellation that’s all Colón’s. In visiting or observing, we learn a little something about our humanity.