Cob is pleased to present Devotion, the resulting exhibition of the fourth Cob Award residency recipient, Nereida Patricia. Working in the gallery’s onsite studio over the summer, the site-specific exhibition represents the culmination of extensive research and development under the residency programme.

In Devotion, Nereida Patricia has created a new series of multilayered, beaded paintings that connect disparate material processes they have cumulated over the last five years. The result are seductive oil paintings that touch on the psychedelic, each encased in layers of resin, fibreglass reinforced concrete, crushed glass dust, and glass beads. Paintings are grounded in written poetic text, which captures the fleeting moments of transition and liminality of their subject. At once narrative and allegorical, they quickly shift into a spiritual plane of abstract color and texture.

Works are inspired by political feminist craft traditions like arpilleras, which became popular under dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, and the spiritual beaded quilts of Haitian drapo vodou, yet aim to create a visual language of their own through the merging of influences and techniques. With an eye for cosmology and the spiritual over identity politics, Patricia creates mythologies that relate to the human body yet shift towards allegory as an operation of world-building and systemic healing. The artist utilises their own body, Caribbean heritage, and lived experience as the first point of reference to create new mythologies that centre Black and brown people in trans and marginalised communities, as well as those living and working in the street. 

Setting in motion a suite of paintings that meditate on physiological, psychological, and spiritual flux, the artwork St. Sebastian (2024) reintroduces a queer biblical myth. One of the most widely depicted saints throughout the late Gothic and Renaissance period, St. Sebastian was persecuted and sentenced to death by arrows, but he did not die. Patricia depicts St. Sebastian as a gaudy drag queen, caught between the throes of martyrdom and sexual climax, pointing to the tension between the bodily release of sex and death, or the transition of flesh into spirit. Patricia also references the formal connection of arrows in St. Sebastian’s body to the Nkisi N'kondi statues of the Bakongo tribe, who draw nails in the sculpted figure to activate spiritual force. 

In Devotion (2024) and Shipwreck (2024), Patricia focuses on the circularity of time and space held in syncretic spiritual traditions and cultural myths of the Caribbean. The artist references Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulations” to adapt a narrative that proposes to redress the omissions of Western history and imagine a future that could be. The myth of a hermaphrodite mermaid and a shipwreck overlayed on top of a New York City subway platform create an immersive mythopoeic around the afterlife of colonization and transatlantic slave trade, as well as the urban black experience. 

Layering present times over autobiography and historical events are a site of generation for the artist. Sidewalk Annunciation (2024) and Wigs & Plus (Beauty Supply Blues)[2024], present magical realism in quotidian urban space to signal spiritual cadence. Sidewalk Annunciation references the biblical Annunciation, when, according to biblical accounts, the Angel Gabriel revealed to the Virgin Mary that she would bear the Son of God. Sliding into the surreal and psychedelic, Wigs & Plus (Beauty Supply Blues) presents an empty beauty supply store with wigless mannequin heads. 

Without providing answers, Patricia asks viewers to consider the meeting point of birth, death, freedom, transformation, the profane and its salvation—both spiritual and personal. Each work continues the artist’s exploration of abstracted body gestures and motifs—converging multiple perspectives, text, and images into one frame. This technique borrows from Caribbean literary theory and the work of Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott, who respectively founded quantum fiction and understood diasporic consciousness as something fragmented as a shattered vase, pieced whole through storytelling. 

Patricia imagines each work as a portal into a space unbound from the oppressive project of Western history and ideas of human and nature. Compositions move between figuration and abstraction, tracing the poetics of the body (or its absence) to navigate the dichotomy of freedom and restraint. A lingering musicality is scored using colour and the artist’s formal transformation of text-to-flesh-to-spirit.

Nereida Patricia (b. 1996, New York) is a visual artist and poet based in Brooklyn, NY. Patricia’s practice spans sculpture, painting, and performance. Her work draws from Peruvian and Caribbean symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments, to explore gender, race and sexual politics. She is most well-known for her highly detailed glass beaded relief sculptures, which are collaged with concrete and glass dust to create multilayered images in bas-relief that chronicle transformation and power relations of the human and collective body. She has studied at The New School and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Harkawik, New York; Murmurs Gallery, Los Angeles; DUPLEX, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Lubov, New York; and The Knockdown Center, Queens, among others.