Hunter, Healer, Warrior, Death
Maria RJ
GALLERY II
Maria RJ, una memoria de Baba Iao (detail), 2025, 74 x 47 inches, mixed media quilt.
March 22 – April 20, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, March 22, from 6–8pm
“creole (dictionary adjective definition): bred or growing in a country, but of foreign origin, as an animal or plant.”
A.I.R Gallery is pleased to announce Hunter, Healer, Warrior, Death, a multimedia exhibition by 2024–2025 A.I.R. Fellow Maria RJ that extends the artist’s research into Caribbean oral histories and their presence in the diaspora. The paintings, performances, and sculptures on view draw from Afro-Cuban traditions, Catholic syncretic practices, and the magical realism in everyday folktales to create a space that investigates art’s potential to hold ashé, or vital natural energy. This is Maria RJ’s first solo exhibition in New York.
At the core of Maria RJ’s practice is an interest in exploring how Yorùbá spiritual practices proliferate beyond West Africa and the Caribbean. In Hunter, Healer, Warrior, Death, she turns her attention to four spiritual energies who are closely associated with the forest: Ochosi (the hunter), Osain (the healer), Ogún (the warrior), and Eggun (death). The forest is particularly rife with ashé because so much of its wildlife is ancient. Resisting industrialization and other changes wrought by humans, trees and other flora have managed to endure undisturbed for centuries in old-growth forests such as those found in Appalachia. Similarly, Caribbean and Yorùbá histories, although displaced by colonization and immigration, continue to flourish by reinventing, creolizing, adapting, and hiding in plain sight.
Camouflage materials of various kinds envelop the different elements of the installation. The artificial plastic fiber of camouflage netting, used to mimic nature, becomes a material for a dance in an Appalachian forest, which is represented in the exhibition through video performance. The netting itself then re-enters the space of the white cube, producing a field ground of blues and greens. Hung on the wall is a series of quilted paintings that combine camouflage fabric with other materials like straws and sequins. Works weave in and out of each other; where one form ends, the other begins.
The variation in scale, color, and material creates an immersive environment reminiscent of a forest. By juxtaposing quilted forms with painted surfaces, the exhibition echoes the creolization that occurs when different cultures and stories meet in the Caribbean. In Hunter, Healer, Warrior, Death, Maria RJ creates a gathering where ashé manifests in a myriad of ways: through the abstraction of the paintings, the movements of the performer, and in the material history of each object.
Maria RJ (María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez) (she/her) received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2015 and MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2020. Rodríguez Jiménez has participated in residencies such as the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture (2016), SOMA Summer (2019), and ALMA|LEWIS (2023). Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), the Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), and The Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL), among others. She was a recipient of The Fulbright Research Fellowship (2021) and the NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Fellowship (2022), where she collaborated with Candomblé dancers and practitioners in Brazil. She currently lives and works in Queens, New York.
View Maria RJ’s page here.
View the Press Release here.