SOR:
ARTIST INDEX 001
SLIP INDEX:
JESÚS HILARIO-REYES
PUBLICATION #4
JANUARY 2025 -
JUNE 2025
all proceeds are split with the artists
JESÚS HILARIO-REYES:
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.
INSTAGRAM SOUNDCLOUD
WEBSITE
36 Edgewood
New Haven, Connecticut 06520
04.24.2025. 2 PM. EST.
The SOR production team caught a train headed to New Haven and posed as Yale students for the day. Jesús Hilario-Reyes, a.k.a. MORENXXX, greeted the team at Yale’s MFA sculpture building. They welcomed SOR to their studio and guided them through their senior thesis, visiting each instillation.
Read about their experiecen navigating a rave and studio-based creative process with an in-depth discussion of each piece featured in their thesis exhibition: Slip Index
SLIP INDEX DESCRIPTION:
To evidence the corporal embodying of the dancefloor and its participants, one must look down. The dancefloor is the membrane that accumulates data, whether strands of hair, earrings, sweat, or sweet alcoholic mixtures. It accounts for both a literal and ontological slippage. Their thesis cements this gesture by extracting a dancefloor from Nowadays - a club in NYC - which then acts as a central fixture for their installation. Simultaneously, other works ruminate on the abstraction of space through atmospherics. Each work permeates and blurs towards one another, as thresholds opaque through overlay and fog. Materials enmesh to illustrate a communal embodiment - both aesthetic and affective.