A Survey of Repair, Process, and the Poetics of Refuse
By Yohanna M Roa
At Alessandro Berni Gallery in Chelsea, Mending My Garden is a solo exhibition by Borinquen Gallo. However, after visiting the show and speaking with the artist, it feels more accurate to call it a survey, a deep dive into her long-standing engagement with materiality, waste, and ritualized labor. Running from May 29 through June 29, 2025, the exhibition reflects years of experimentation with synthetic debris, trash bags, caution tape, netting and marks a turning point in how Gallo threads her personal and ecological concerns into a singular visual language.
Gallo, born in Rome and raised in the Bronx, has always taken a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary approach to her practice. She studied at the Cooper Union (BFA), concentrating on painting and sculpture, and Hunter College (MFA), Painting. She is both a conceptual artist and a builder, restoring what others abandon. Her work here does not just reference trash, it absorbs, reconfigures, and redeems it.
Gallo creates structures that resonate beyond their form through careful repetition, twisting, weaving, and braiding. In conversation, she spoke passionately about her relationship to plastics—not only as an artistic medium but as a political and environmental irritant. These materials are seductive, toxic, ever-present, invisible, intimate, and industrial. Gallo’s work invites us to consider this contradiction: how something we use daily can so easily outlive us and reshape the environments we depend on. “Twisting, braiding, weaving these materials becomes a way to domesticate, redeem, and humanize my surroundings,” Gallo mentioned during our conversation. “I am interested in how these gestures, once confined to domesticity, can become acts of public resistance.”
Gallo, B. Fertile Grounds (Series of 4), Debris Netting, caution tape and live plants. Variable dimensions. 2025
In Fertile Grounds, a powerful series of wearable sculptures, explores the woman’s body as a generative, sacred force. Four poncho-like weavings mark stages of motherhood: inspired by fertility goddesses, marsupials, and armor, each piece maps bodily metamorphosis from creation to post-birth resilience. Juxtaposing live plants with caution tape, Gallo highlights tensions between nature and reproductive technology. The work addresses environmental toxins, the crisis of infertility, and the urgent fact that Black women still face the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S.
Gallo, B. Tiger against Tiger, Debris netting, caution tape, repurposed fabric ribbon and electric wire. 8’X14′. 2025
Another major piece, Tiger Against Tiger, uses debris netting, wire, and repurposed ribbon to explore conflict across personal and political spheres. Inspired by an Italian tongue twister, the work becomes a metaphor for relational struggle—how communication often slips into opposition. Woven with the help of intergenerational volunteers, the piece acts as a form of resistance: a communal weaving of shared stories, a place for dialogue in a polarized world. It speaks to the radical potential of listening, making, and healing together.
What is compelling is how Mending My Garden reframes our assumptions about waste. In Gallo’s hands, garbage becomes choreography, each object bound with a sense of rhythm and urgency. These are not static sculptures. They push and stretch, drape and gather. Some resemble nets or skins; others evoke intestines, membranes, or shelters. It is both visceral and architectural, a language of repair constructed through touch and repetition.
However, the “garden” Gallo mends here is environmental but also personal, historical, and spiritual. Her materials comprise construction sites, domestic spaces, disaster zones, and altars. These works have a votive quality, as though each braid and knot is part of an extended prayer for clarity or healing. It is a reminder that mending, in any form, is labor-intensive.
This concern with the environment and repair extends beyond the gallery’s white walls. In May 2025, Gallo participated in @GreenBox @Le Petit Versailles, part of WhiteBox’s outdoor initiative A Vision for the Future in Present Tense, curated by Juan Puntes. There, in the lush public garden of Le Petit Versailles on the Lower East Side, her installation wrapped plastic netting and salvaged materials around living trees and fencing, transforming the space into a hybrid between greenhouse and ghost net. The piece felt like an exhale, less rigid, more porous, yet held the same formal tension and concern for what it means to live with (and among) waste.
Borinquen Gallo, artist with Juan Puntes, Curator of GreenBox@Le Petit Versailles.
There’s nothing didactic about the work, but the message is clear: what we discard says as much about us as what we choose to keep. In a time of mass consumption and ecological crisis, Gallo offers not answers but acts of care—slow, intentional, and brave. Her art insists that we pay attention to what we see and what we throw away, and why.
Mending My Garden is not simply an exhibition of sculptures; it is a record of endurance, a testament to transformation, and a quietly radical proposal that art might begin with what we ignore, and become a space where repair is still possible.
Mending My Garden
Borinquen Gallo
Alessandro Berni Gallery, Chelsea, NYC
May 29 – June 29, 2025
