Kevin Quiles Bonilla, Carryover (Blue Tarp in Vega Alta), 2019 C-print, 41 x 61 x 2 1/4 inches
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Kevin Quiles Bonilla (b. 1992) (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They explore ideas around power, colonialism, and history with their identity as context.
In Carryover (Blue Tarp in Vega Alta), the body of the queer-crip artist merges with and is abstracted by the detritus left behind in the wake of Hurricane Maria, a blue plastic tarp. What, Bonilla asks us, are we doing with the piles of ruins left in Puerto Rico – and elsewhere – in the wake of the disasters caused by climate change? How does the lack of substantial response to the climate crises pile danger upon danger, indignity upon indignity, further carrying over colonial oppression onto the bodies of those in the storm’s path? The blue tarp itself becomes a signifier of loss and disposability after a disaster, serving as flimsy coverings to patch the holes in houses. As Bonilla notes, these blue tarps still dot the island today. Bonilla stands out of and in nature where the stiff folds of the blue tarp over their head and body create a sculptural structure that reappropriates the detritus of disaster that was intended for disposability and remakes it into an almost grand form. However, as Bonilla’s limp posture emphasizes, this grandeur is imbued with a grief for those lives and livelihoods lost to climate crises. Bonilla takes the possibilities of the blue tarp one step further, asking us “What happens when the body replaces the structure? – or rather, what happens when the body becomes the structure to protect?”
Instagram: @kevinquilesbonilla
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