Boomerang is a solo exhibition by New York City-based artist Jairo Sosa, nominated by Hugh Hayden. The exhibition presents new ceramics-based works informed by personal and collective memory. Sosa’s rigorous practice builds from the tension of slip-casting and press molding to compose a sculptural language attuned to the space between hope and collapse, ascension and return.
The works in the exhibition echo nostalgic and familiar forms, engaging in a process of abstraction, repetition, and fragmentation that coalesces into a passionate poetics of endurance. Utilizing meticulous systems of replication, he transforms these objects through a shift in materiality. Presented in their multiplicity, they invoke reverberations of home, while also unsettling the assumptions embedded in homecoming.
A sparrowhawk—a solitary bird of prey adaptive to the city—appears as a figure of vigilance and restraint. Candles, often found at street vigils, trace collective and ephemeral presence. Basketballs in various states of inflation and rupture are vessels of gravity, velocity, and illusion, marking loss, precarity, and motion in shared space. Boomerang is a meditation on resilience as a form of momentum shaped by return, variation, and accumulated force, offering an invitation to circle back to, rebound from—and perhaps even reconcile ourselves through—memory, history, and the unfinished work of becoming.*
Text by Jinny Khanduja, originally published as an exhibition essay and in the accompanying catalogue for Boomerang, Cue Art Foundation, 2025, adapted for this presentation.*
Further reading: Alliyah Allen, “Transcending Ubiquity: Presence as a Means of Flight,” in Boomerang (exhibition catalogue), Cue Art Foundation, 2025.
Photos by Leo Ng