Caroline Garcia: Versus Earth

Caroline Garcia’s research-driven practice spans performance, moving image, and installation, weaving ethno-traditional knowledge with digital technologies. In Versus Earth, she engages with the Indigenous history of Wave Hill through reimagined weapons of the First Americans—arrowheads, spears, and war clubs customary to the Ramapo Munsee Lenape Nation—crafted not from wood and stone but from reclaimed plastic waste sourced in the Bronx. Building on her martial arts practice and research begun during her 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace residency, Garcia explores plastic as both an environmental threat and a material infused with animacy, motion, and spiritual resonance. Suspended bioplastic forms and projectiles evoke ceremonial, functional, and resistant roles of weapons, unsettling assumed hierarchies of living and dead matter, botany, and self-defense, offering a reordering of the world’s resources instead.

Organized by Curator of Visual Arts Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, the Sunroom Project Space is an open call opportunity for New York-area artists to develop and exhibit a site-specific project as a solo exhibition. The 2025 applications were reviewed by a panel of arts professionals including Jordany Genao, a Dominican interdisciplinary artist and educator; Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, an artist whose practice unfolds performatively through creative experiences within the quotidian, and the founding director of The Interior Beauty Salon, an organism at the intersection of creativity and healing; and Gugelberger.

PUBLIC PROGRAM Saturday, October 25, 1:15PM, Meet the Artist: Conversation with Gary Dušek, founder of Precious Plastic NYC and director of the Waste Reclamation Action Program.