Cuerpos cósmicos, between the earth and the skies / entre los cielos y la tierra
Mindy Solomon is pleased to present Cuerpos cósmicos: between the earth and the skies / entre los cielos y la tierra, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Natalia Arbelaez and Daniela Gomez Paz. Both artists, of Colombian descent, share a resonant artistic dialogue grounded in cultural memory, spirituality, and the material and metaphysical connections between body and cosmos.
In this exhibition, themes of death, spirituality, and the cosmos intertwine with reflections on the physical body and its intimate relationship to the earth. Through distinct yet complementary practices, Arbelaez and Gomez Paz explore how histories — both personal and collective — are embedded in material, gesture, and form. Arbelaez describes her artistic practice as an ongoing act of research and reclamation:
“I use my work to research undervalued histories, such as Latin American, Amerindian, and Women of Color. I work with how these identities are lost through conquest, migration, and time, and gained through family, culture, exploration, and passed down through tradition, preservation, and genetic memory. In my research, I have found value in my histories and aim to help continue my cultures by preserving and honoring them.
I’ve embraced my use of craft and clay not only in my process but also in historical and cultural research. In studying lost, conquered, and overlooked communities, I have found that craft belongs in my pursuit. I relate to the role of the craftsperson — often linked to women’s work, the working class, and cultural tradition. The material also plays an important role as I examine the history of my ancestral materials. Terra-cotta, historically regarded as a lesser material, and Majolica glaze, brought from Europe and used to conceal terra-cotta, become metaphors I use to describe colonization.”
Through clay and glaze, Arbelaez engages material hierarchies as allegories for cultural erasure and resilience, elevating craft as both methodology and resistance. Gomez Paz approaches similar themes through fiber-based works that merge the corporeal with the ecological. She writes:
“I thread fibers as strands of information, exploring femininity and the porous boundaries between the body and nature. My process delves into the emotive terrain within myself, unearthing the vast fabric of being. Through both natural and synthetic fibers, I draw on dynamic, self-organized systems in nature, reflecting on how matter shifts, endures, and transforms over time.
My practice meets feminist theory with (auto)biographical imaginaries in a process that questions hierarchical constructs within the production of knowledge and vindicates diverse forms of resistance and subversion embedded in the complex fabric of feminized labor. Some works mirror the building of birds’ nests to navigate themes of care, protection, and precarity. Others empathize with the ways rocks take on living qualities, contemplating their movement and growth over deep time. I dwell in these worlds to craft liminal spaces and imagine emergent ways of being. I stitch color to suspend movement in place, capturing moments in flux — to document the undocumented.”
Together, Arbelaez and Gomez Paz construct a space where earthbound materials — clay, fiber, glaze — become conduits for cosmic reflection. Cuerpos cósmicos situates the body as both archive and vessel, suspended between sky and soil, memory and matter, loss and regeneration.
About the Artists
Daniela Gomez Paz is a Caleña-US mixed-media artist combining textile elements with painting and sculpture. She threads fibers as strands of information, exploring femininity and the porous boundaries between the body and nature. She acquired a Double Degree: BFA & BA from SUNY Purchase, a MAT from Queens College, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has been awarded Yale’s School of Art Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award in drawing/painting from nature, the Alice Kimball Traveling Fellowship, and the Fountainhead Residency Fellowship. Gomez Paz has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions across NYC, Beijing, Milan, and CDMX. Her background in pedagogy led her to facilitate a wide range of programs in schools and museum education. Currently, Gomez Paz is a lecturer at SUNY Purchase and Pratt Institute.
Natalia Arbelaez is a Colombian American artist, born and raised in Miami, Florida to immigrant parents. She received her B.F.A. from Florida International University and her M.F.A. from The Ohio State University, with an Enrichment Fellowship. In 2016-2017 she was a Rittenberg Fellow at Clay Art Center; Port Chester, New York and was awarded the Inaugural Artaxis Fellowship that funded a residency to Watershed in Newcastle, ME. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in museums, galleries, and included in various collections, such as the ICA Instittue of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, The Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada, The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY, and Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY. She was recognized by NCECA as a 2018 Emerging Artist and was a 2018-19 resident artist at the Ceramics Program at Harvard University where she researched pre-Columbian art and histories. Natalia was an artist in residence at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City where she researched the work of historical and influential women ceramicists of color and continues this research in her practice today.
