Zulu Padilla

Everything is Migrating
Artistic Discipline: Visual Arts
Category: Brooklyn Arts Fund
Grant Year: 2022
Location: Prospect Lefferts Gardens
zulu-padilla.jpg

Everything is Migrating is an exhibition whose central motif is the intersection between the neotropical migration of Warbler birds, and the resilient culture of gay cruising in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. This work allows multiples perspectives to unfold: poetics, the political and psychological, embodying urgent visual participation through the ease and tension between uprootedness, freedom and beauty. Medium scale, odd shape-float-mount-frameless photographic mixed media pieces of birds and gay cruising activity will be assembled to create this exhibition. These two seemingly disparate natural phenomena intersect each Spring, Summer and fall in the park where birds, birders and cruisers share the ground and soar in both the skies and in sexual ecstasies. One of the strangest intersections I make use of can be found in the hundreds of used latex condoms discarded in the dirt of the wooded areas in the park. They disintegrate until all that is left is a ring. The goals are to highlight the stories and resilience of the warblers, the gay community, and impact those who stand tangential to those stories – migrants, and the general public, culminating in the understanding that everything is migrating.

Photo by Eddie De Leon.