imagining spaces
Carolina Paz
GALLERY I
Carolina Paz, imagining spaces, 2025, acrylic on 1200 1x1 inch wood cubes to be activated by visitors following artist's prompts, variable dimensions (installation).
October 18–November 16, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, October 18, from 6–8pm
Guided Tour and Artwork Activation: Saturday, November 1 from 4–6 pm
Conversation with Carolina Paz and Aliza Rachel Edelman: Saturday, November 15 from 4–6 pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce imagining spaces, an exhibition of recent work by A.I.R. New York Member Carolina Paz. Featuring a participatory installation and three ongoing series of small-scale paintings, Paz’s exhibition explores the intersections of art-making and “art-thinking,” reflecting on how artistic processes can generate new ways of sensing, thinking, and being together.[1] The exhibition is presented alongside Practices of Love and World-Making (2025), a durational artwork that takes the form of a salon at Paz’s nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard studio from October 22 to December 10, 2025. Curated by Iara Pimenta, imagining spaces is Paz's first solo exhibition in New York City.
Paz’s artistic practice engages with the philosophy of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, bell hooks, Suely Rolnik, Gilles Deleuze, and Baruch Spinoza, particularly their reflections on transformation and relational existence. Paz approaches art as a conceptual and formal expression of sensations and affects, working through the idea of a porous body that acts, responds, and is altered in relation to others. In this continual exchange, transformation unfolds as a shared and collective experience.
Anchoring the exhibition is the eponymous participatory installation imagining spaces (2025), consisting of 1,200 1-inch painted wooden cubes divided into six pastel hues and placed directly on the gallery floor. Recalling Paz’s earlier participatory projects aimed at encouraging dialogue and shared reflections, the installation invites visitors to build arrangements of cubes in response to simple prompts that change weekly. As participants sit or crouch to build lines, squares, stacks, and curves, they co-create the work according to their own imaginations. Though the cubes are uniform in size, they are unique in tone and texture, each one slightly different from the others. Just as no two cubes are the same, no two arrangements will be identical; each is a temporary intervention that reverberates through those that follow.
Three ongoing series of small-scale paintings, wording (since 2020), square fields (since 2021), and grid (since 2024), are similarly tactile, employing abstraction to foster connection with their inviting textures and colors. The paintings in wording feature diagrammatic compositions that place words such as "space" and "room" alongside geometric shapes like triangles and circles. Prompting a dialogue between these two graphic elements, the works suggest spatial relationships that extend beyond the physical to the atmospheric and sensorial.
The other two series of paintings in the exhibition explore the grid as a site of relation and becoming, featuring dynamic modular compositions of intersecting edges and reliefs of layered oil paint and wax. Painted on wood panels, the works in square fields bear thick parallel ridges, superimposed squares, and distorted grids in soft shades of blue, purple, pink, yellow, and off-white, punctuated at times by bright pulses of yellow and red. Their built-up surfaces serve as fields where color and matter interact, using geometry to ignite sensation.
In grid, Paz arranges 2 x 2-inch canvases painted in light, harmonizing tones of yellow, orange, purple, and pink to create larger modular configurations. Composed of multiple individual canvases, each with its own distinct brushstrokes, stains, and irregularities, these grids are imperfect and deformed, reaffirming both the singularity of their elements and the dynamism of their being together. In this way, the grid becomes a virtual diagram of forces—ideas, feelings, questions, experiences—that interact with each other to produce collective sensations.
imagining spaces marks a turning point in Paz’s artistic practice, as she shifts from an earlier focus on representation and identity to explore abstraction’s capacity to engender connection and exchange. Engaging visitors as both makers and thinkers, the exhibition offers a layered inquiry into poetics, social ethics, abstraction, and shared transformation. Art becomes a collaborative, open-ended inquiry into the fluxes between self and other, image and idea, being and becoming.
[1] The concept of “art thinking” is articulated by Luis Camnitzer, who argues that “art is a way of organizing and acquiring knowledge, and not just making things.” “Luis Camnitzer on “Art Thinking” and Art History,” Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, November 26, 2014, <www.guggenheim.org/video/luis-camnitzer-on-art-thinking-and-art-history>.
Carolina Paz is a Brazilian artist whose work moves at the intersection of language, poetic consciousness, and social change. She shifts between painting, installation, text, video, and reconfigurations of care, creating gestures of closeness, interruption, and realignment. She meets the world as matter in process, often through iteration, dislocation, and attentive presence. Curatorial and pedagogical modes are integral to her practice; she builds platforms, programs, and exhibitions as living ecologies that question, hold, and transform. She founded Uncool Artist, a structure for experimental development and field transformation, and serves as both artist and board member at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. From 2010 to 2017, she directed Coletivo 2e1 in São Paulo. Her work has been shown in museums, biennials, institutional venues, and artist-run spaces in Brazil, the United States, Spain, Portugal, and Argentina. She received the Funarte Visual Arts Prize, and her pieces are held in private and public collections in the United States, Europe, and Brazil. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and graduate degrees in Social Sciences and in Media and Knowledge from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. www.carolinapaz.com.
View Carolina Paz’s page here.
View the Press Release here.