Sapar Contemporary Gallery + Incubator

Gabriela Albergaria explores relationships between nature and humans, often focusing on care, healing, and our manipulation of the environment. She draws us into less noticed phases of lifecycles, like decomposition, or expansive geologic time that vastly exceeds human-centered experience. Through the reverent attention of her eye and hand, she magnifies the importance of pausing, rest, and restoration amid these seemingly fallow or inert periods. The meditative nature in her work generates a fuller appreciation of how phases of life and death travel in a reliant circle. This exhibition features distinct bodies of work that unfold like the chapters of a book: observational drawings of nurse logs and glacier-moved boulders; wall-based installations and related works on paper featuring twigs she has collected from forests and parks; and a monumental cloth cascading into the gallery that Albergaria has sewn together from used washing sheets. Nurse logs are trunks and stumps of fallen trees that have died and are now the rich habitat for many organisms: mushrooms, microbes, insects and animals, and often new trees. From a human perspective, nurse logs are often unsightly or undesirable in comparison to a living tree. Yet for the rich ecosystem of a forest, the nurse log is the healer and facilitator of new life In a world in which we can so easily, with a click of a button, buy something freshly new and only single-use, Albergaria calls for this season of rest to bring about repair and quiet, aesthetic devotion to the afterlives of items.