NADA New York 2025

G. Rosa-Rey’s conflicting relationship with the grid can be traced throughout her work. The grid is a structure she uses to envision space, yet she’s aware that the gridded envisioning of space was both a tool and a product of colonization. Instead of avoiding conflicts and contradictions, she incises the grid with an X-ACTO blade, carving the lines through the surface of the canvas. For Rosa-Rey, these incisions are an awareness of this grid as a colonial device that partitioned land, set up borders, and forcefully removed generations of families. Clouds, climates, atmospheres, oceans, sand, and earth overflow the constraints of these incised lines and exist beyond these margins. These simple gestures in her work are elemental and primordial, expressing ideas in their bare bones without seductive embellishments.