Project for Empty Space’s Feminist FUTURES Fellow Alyssa Alexander proudly presents Sonic Womb: Leaving Gender on the Dance Floor, a two-part exhibition series at PES FUTURES (128 Baxter Street) in Chinatown from April 23rd to June 7th and June 25th to August 16th. A reception will be held June 25th from 6 PM EST to 8 PM EST for the unveiling of Part Two: on atmospherics by Jesús Hilario-Reyes.
Sonic Womb seeks to replicate the subterranean refuge of both the mythological underwater kingdom of Drexciya and the underground clubs of 1970’s New York City within two site-specific installations by Billy and Jesús Hilario-Reyes. The second installation, on atmospherics by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, takes up “edging” or “edge worlds” as a framework for understanding both the ecstatic potentiality of the club and the adaptive nature of the mangrove – spaces where “the bounds of the individual and the environment are indistinguishable.” These connections are not to make synonymous but rather seek a dialectic or relational poetics - a tinted mirror or a reflection in rippled waters where we see erotic joy burst out of entanglement. The mangrove, a tropical tree species typically found in coastal environments where water meets land, weaves throughout Hilario-Reyes’ practice as a conceptual and visual mechanism for exploring fugitivity, illegibility, and communal embodiment.
“I wish to think about belongingness to this blurry, fogged-out temporal space that is saturated with so much movement, crystallized with so much devotion, as the nucleus to nightspace. And everything else is about a periphery or relation to it. Could this be our saving grace? A hurricane of bodies enmeshed, engaged in durational autonomy. About an oncoming horizon, or being synonymous to one…” - Hilario-Reyes on his installation.
About Alyssa Alexander | alyssa-alexander.squarespace.com
Alyssa Alexander is an independent curator and arts administrator based in Brooklyn, NY. With a background in journalism and critical writing, she is currently building a curatorial practice and pursuing more in-depth cultural and art-historical research that centers artists of African descent. She is dedicated to working with emerging artists and institutions to cultivate a more accessible and equitable creative economy. Most recently, she was awarded the Inaugural Feminist Futures Curatorial Fellowship from Project For Empty Space.
About Jesús Hilario-Reyes | jesushilario.com
Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, and New Haven, CT, Jesús Hilario-Reyes (San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an antidisciplinary artist with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters in Sculpture from Yale University. Recently a recipient of the Drawing a Blank Artist Grant, the Leslie Lohman Museum Fellowship, the Lighthouse Works Fellowship (2022), and the Bemis Center Residency (2022) program. Jesús Hilario-Reyes has exhibited/screened/performed most notably at BOFFO Performance Festival (Fire Island), Frieze (London), e-Flux (NYC), Gladstone Gallery (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Star Film Festival (Philadelphia, PN), Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Rudimento (Quito, ECUA), Parasol Unit (London, UK), and Gladstone Gallery (NYC). Primarily rooted in sculpture, their practice navigates the intersections of sonic performance, land-based installation, and expanded cinema. Through iterative engagements with carnival and rave culture across the West, Hilario-Reyes takes a reparative approach to the concept of destierro—an untranslatable Spanish term akin to being "torn from the land." They use this concept to explore Black and Queer fugitivity, examining the im/possibility of the Black body and its entanglement with photographic and cinematic optics. Informed by an evolving engagement with sound systems, lighting, and atmospherics within nightscapes such as clubs and raves, their work transforms tools of urgency—like the siren—into modes of embodiment and transcendence. Hilario-Reyes embraces masquerade, satire, and spectacle as strategies to interrogate systems of hypervisibility, while their object- and installation-based practices reflect a broader search for belonging within states of flux. These environments gesture toward the Blur: a shifting space of refusal, resonance, and recontextualized materiality.
About The Feminist FUTURES Fellowship
This comprehensive fellowship program is designed to amplify the voices of emerging curators dedicated to feminist perspectives in the contemporary art landscape but also to provide acrucial safe space for creative practitioners of all gender identities who are interested in Intersectional Feminist thought. It serves as a platform for productive and critical intersectional dialogue, fostering catharsis, camaraderie, and education within the artistic community. While the Feminist FUTURES Fellowship, which was previously known as the Feminist Incubator, remains artist-centric, it embraces the idea of multicentricity and room for new thought and experimentation within the intersectional framework. Because intersectional feminism is an ever-evolving practice, so should the architecture of a feminist-oriented program. In this recalibrated context, the FI creates space for new curatorial visions and new artistic practices.
*Project for Empty Space considers ‘feminism’ to be an ever-evolving framework. At this moment, we consider the works of a variety of feminist communities across the Global South and/or Intersectional practices. Feminism is not bound by gender; rather, it is a practice of movement toward equity across communities and identities.