Boomerang
Mentor: Hugh Hayden
June 26 – September 7, 2025
Wed–Sat, 12–6 pm

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 26th, 6–8 pm [RSVP]

Boomerang is a solo exhibition by New York City-based artist Jairo Sosa, with mentorship from 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. Sosa brings them from the street to his studio, 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—interrogating what can be held, and for how long. 

An alchemical charge moves through Sosa’s gestures; water carries a consciousness, heat catalyzes strength, and together they draw form into being through forces both exacting and unpredictable. Even in repetition, the clay resists ease—its coarse surface presses back, leaving an impression not only on the work, but on the body that shapes it. Across this process, Sosa works with an embodied agility: a practiced responsiveness—and at times, a surrender—to form, friction, and volatility.

Boomerang draws from these material logics to reflect on the looping trajectories of departure and arrival—on the ways in which aspirations of escape or success often arc back toward origin. Sosa’s sculptures, cast and recast, embrace recursion and accumulation. In the work, ceramic is neither fragile nor decorative; it becomes a resilient syntax through which to circumnavigate questions of inherency, survival, mobility, and the nuanced weight of longing for transcendence. 

Sosa’s works are not singular or self-contained. 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, hovering at the edges of visibility. 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. These are the materials of lived proximity—objects that mark loss, precarity, and motion in shared space. Each form is precise, yet provisionary—imprinted with residue of its original and of those made before it, yet altered by recalibration and reaching toward something incomplete. Memory appears as sediment, as the source material of dreams and grief fractured over time.

Boomerang is a meditation on resilience as a form of momentum shaped by return, variation, and accumulated force. Through the works in the exhibition, Sosa offers us an invitation to circle back to, rebound from—and perhaps even reconcile ourselves through—memory, history, and the unfinished work of becoming.

About the Artist
Jairo Sosa is a Dominican-American multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and based in New York City. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He went on to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Cooper Union for the Advancement for Science and Art in New York (2017), during which he studied abroad at the Universitat de Barcelona Escuela de Bellas Artes in Barcelona, Spain (2016). He also received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2023). 

Sosa’s work has been presented in the solo exhibition Be True To The Game at Room 3557, Los Angeles, CA (2024), as well as several group exhibitions, including: Dark Matter at Kates-Ferri Projects, New York, NY (2023), Stand-outs: Selections from the Columbia MFA Program at Fredric Snitzer Gallery. Miami, FL (2023); 11:11 at At Peace Gallery, New York, NY (2020); and Traces at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ (2017), among others.

About the Mentor
Hugh Hayden nominated Jairo Sosa for this opportunity. Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, Hayden transforms familiar objects—often using wood with layered histories such as discarded trunks, rare timbers, or Christmas trees—into composite forms that reflect complex cultural narratives. His work challenges perceptions of identity, social structures, and our relationship to the environment.

Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Recent solo exhibitions include Gulf Stream at the Boston Public Art Triennial's Lot Lab (2024), Huff and a Puff, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2023), and Brier Patch at Madison Square Park Conservancy (2022), later shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art (2022) and Dumbarton Oaks Gardens (2022-23). Other solo exhibitions include shows at the Rose Art Museum, Nasher Sculpture Center, Lisson Gallery (NY, LA, London), Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Blaffer Art Museum, C L E A R I N G (Brussels), and Princeton University Art Museum. Hayden’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Met, LACMA, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Exhibition Materials

Press Release
Click here to download a PDF version of the exhibition press release. For more info or press materials, email press@cueartfoundation.org.

Catalogue
Boomerang is accompanied by a color catalogue with texts by artist Jairo Sosa, exhibition mentor Hugh Hayden, and catalogue essayist Alliyah Allen (as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program). The catalogue will be available to read online, and a print version will be available to gallery visitors.