Step into Jairo Sosa’s installation, “Be True to the Game” and it feels as though you’ve stumbled upon the conclusion of a journey, an archaeological site or a moment of collective surrender. Room 3557, a small and mighty artist project space, is brimming with eight tons of sand and partially buried earthenware, stoneware and porcelain basketballs in various shapes of mishape, deflation and rupture, along with one built-in corner pedestal. Sosa’s basketballs range in color from metallic and leather-like glazes to capturing the oozing minerals of a cave. The one-room exhibition space acts as a crucible for the fired materials, where the earth tones give the basketballs a purpose beyond decoration amidst the sand dunes. Just as the ceramic basketballs are too fragile to bounce, too deflated to serve their intended purpose or too deeply buried to be prominently displayed, it seems Sosa responds to performance expectations with a sense of resistance, yet he doesn’t disengage from “The Game” either. Instead, he aims to complicate it, suggesting a landscape devoid of players, a season where all the purpose falls away, retracting from a heightened sense of performance and evoking a sense of winter. Sosa establishes conditions wherein he can engage in refusal and decelerate spectacles, both in object and ambiance, in order to disorder conditions of recognized subjugation.

Room 3557
3557 1st St.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through February 23, 2024