By Nick Serrata, ONLINE EDITOR California-based artist Gabriel Boscana’s “Factory Head” is one of 12 works on display.

Boscana contributes exclusive series to Rainbow Gallery

By Mareesa Nicosia
LIFESTYLES EDITOR

“Muscles became ropes, hands and wrists became nuts and bolts and heart beats became motor RPMs,” says Gabriel Boscana, of his fresh exhibit  Maquina de Adentro, which is on display at the Rainbow Gallery.

Art Student Association (ASA) Vice President Kelly Hider, along with President Jocelyn McIntosh and approximately 24 members of the ASA club, have been working since last spring to find an appropriate artist to display in the Rainbow Gallery this winter.

Boscana, 28, who is Puerto Rican but grew up in the Rochester area, was the right artist for the space, and he created the Maquinas de Adentro series exclusively at the request of the ASA, McIntosh said. “We’re very proud to have a series of artwork that is being shown for the first time in this space,” she said.
 
“Gabe didn’t want the art in frames,” Hider said. “He wanted it just hung on the wall straight from the studio.”

Hanging the work this way showcases its tangible quality. Many of the 12 pieces are mixed mediums done on hard board or wood, such as “Brain + Hot Air,” which is a collage of prints interspersed with pen and ink drawings. Up close, unobstructed by any covering, the grains in the wood and the wiggling marker lines jump out at you.

Half the pieces are in dark neutral shades of grey, white, black, silver and tan, and the effect of this is a bare-bones and understated feeling when you first enter the gallery.
But it’s in the few of Boscana’s pieces that use color that cynical observations of his “own internal machine” and the amalgamation of physical labor and machinery are illustrated most strikingly.

For example, “Factory Head,” an acrylic on canvas, has a cartoonish or comic strip quality. The bright blues and reds jump out of the piece and into your face, while the man’s expression shows a dull, mechanical-like attitude toward his task, and even toward his state of being — that of a half-man, half-machine.

The hand-printed words, “I am working. I am work. Work calls. I am what I do. My work defines me ...” make viewing an intimate experience, because you’re reading the voice of the artist himself.

“I was born and raised and continue to be working class,” Boscana writes in his artist’s statement accompanying the series. “The last few years, as an obsessive coffee person, I have realized that as people of this working class, we have become machines.”

Boscana works in an upscale barrista in San Francisco called Ritual when he is not creating art in the studio.

Maquinas de Adentro will be displayed in the Tower Rainbow Gallery through Feb. 16.