"Boomerang" by Jairo Sosa

Join us in celebrating the opening of Boomerang, a solo exhibition by Jairo Sosa, with mentorship from Hugh Hayden. The exhibition presents new ceramics-based works informed by personal and collective memory. Sosa’s rigorous practice builds from the tension of slip-casting and press molding to compose a sculptural language attuned to the space between hope and collapse, ascension and return.

The works in the exhibition echo nostalgic and familiar forms. Sosa brings them from the street to his studio, engaging in a process of abstraction, repetition, and fragmentation that coalesces into a passionate poetics of endurance. Utilizing meticulous systems of replication, he transforms these objects through a shift in materiality—interrogating what can be held, and for how long. 

An alchemical charge moves through Sosa’s gestures; water carries a consciousness, heat catalyzes strength, and together they draw form into being through forces both exacting and unpredictable. Even in repetition, the clay resists ease—its coarse surface presses back, leaving an impression not only on the work, but on the body that shapes it. Across this process, Sosa works with an embodied agility: a practiced responsiveness—and at times, a surrender—to form, friction, and volatility.

Boomerang draws from these material logics to reflect on the looping trajectories of departure and arrival—on the ways in which aspirations of escape or success often arc back toward origin. Sosa’s sculptures, cast and recast, embrace recursion and accumulation. In the work, ceramic is neither fragile nor decorative; it becomes a resilient syntax through which to circumnavigate questions of inherency, survival, mobility, and the nuanced weight of longing for transcendence. Sosa’s works are not singular or self-contained. Presented in their multiplicity, they invoke reverberations of home, while also unsettling the assumptions embedded in homecoming. A sparrowhawk—a solitary bird of prey adaptive to the city—appears as a figure of vigilance and restraint, hovering at the edges of visibility. Candles often found at street vigils trace collective and ephemeral presence. Basketballs in various states of inflation and rupture are vessels of gravity, velocity, and illusion. These are the materials of lived proximity—objects that mark loss, precarity, and motion in shared space. Each form is precise, yet provisionary—imprinted with residue of its original and of those made before it, yet altered by recalibration and reaching toward something incomplete. Memory appears as sediment, as the source material of dreams and grief fractured over time.

Boomerang is a meditation on resilience as a form of momentum shaped by return, variation, and accumulated force. Through the works in the exhibition, Sosa offers us an invitation to circle back to, rebound from—and perhaps even reconcile ourselves through—memory, history, and the unfinished work of becoming.