After the Rains

May 6 - July 24, 2026
Opening Reception: May 6, 6–8 pm

Selva Aparicio
Bianca Abdi-Boragi
Von Coffin
Armando Guadalupe Cortés
Abbey McBride
Virginia L. Montgomery
Randi Renate
Raúl Romero
Susan Silas

Curated by Michael Eckblad and Deric Carner

EFA Gallery is pleased to present After the Rains, a group show featuring EFA Member artists Armando Guadalupe Cortés and Susan Silas in conversation with Yale MFA alumni artists Selva Aparicio, Bianca Boragi, Von Coffin, Virginia L. Montgomery, Randi Renate, and Raúl Romero. Through hybrid forms that traverse sculpture, installation, sound, and video, the works embody EFA Gallery’s mission to foster immersive, ambitious, and artist-directed practices.

For the spring exhibition, curators Michael Eckblad and Deric Carner invited artists whose work engages themes rooted in the earth, including transience and renewal. These concerns are shaped through reflections on mortality, technology, and human-nature relations. The exhibition considers the interconnectedness of all things through forms and materials such as fruit, drums, feathers, phones, moths, and mud, evoking systems larger than the human.

On Thursday, May 14, at 6 PM, EFA will host an evening of performances featuring artist Armando Guadalupe Cortés and choreographer Abbey McBride, each offering distinct works reflective of their individual practices.

Von Coffin’s numbered series of “Sconces” fills the gallery with a synthetic array of jewel-toned, hard-edged objects. They evoke the bounty of nature, such as flowers and fruits, as well as the manufactured delights of candy and expensive design. Their utility is clearly as attractors, but their function or origin beyond that is opaque.

Bianca Abdi-Boragi offers a different take on the fusion of the manufactured and organic. Lemon halves are cast in bronze as telephone headsets. A pomegranate becomes a keypad. Antique suitcases, their exteriors coated with sand and interiors painted with scenes of her ancestral Algeria, suggest displacement and the grounding of memory.

“Moon Moth Transcends Black Hole” is one of Virginia L. Montgomery’s quintessential digital videos, centered around luna moths that Virginia raises in her studio. One cannot confuse Virginia’s work with anyone else’s; cosmic blue, references to astrophysics, and a piercing of the canvas spatially and temporally. This work was commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in 2025.

Raúl Romero extends the logic of drum construction into the organizing principles of plant life, centering the plants as the maker, conductor, or vessel for sound transmission. His sculpture “Gravitational Grit” reimagines a bass drum as a living object, grassy and seeking sunlight.

Armando Guadalupe Cortés exhibits his colorful “feather balls” alongside a new series of adobe and limewash panels, which the artist will activate and transform during the exhibition.

Randi Renate is an artist dedicated to awareness and preservation of ocean reefs, revealing their math and wonder to audiences at myriad scales. For this show, we present several of Randi’s ceramic sculptures, including the wall-mounted “orbicella faveolata (mountainous star coral)” (2024) and the freestanding “pleasure politics & artistic alimentation as an anomura” (2024), inspired by Hermit crab shells.

Susan Silas’s video “the woman and the falcon” (2022) features the artist as a female falconer with her falcon, each in their own skin. Silas references John Berger’s 1977 essay, “Why Look at Animals?”, in which he argues that consumer societies have broken down the traditions that existed between man and nature. “This work is an attempt to explore a recuperation of the exchange of the gaze between the woman and the falcon and to consider the implications of that attempt in relation to the current devastation of our environment.”

“Conjoined Dreams” by Selva Aparicio offers a more restrained counterpoint to an artistic practice often defined by forceful engagements with mortality. Aparicio has embedded dandelion seeds into a gridded paper canvas. The paper-making process suspends the seeds, preserving them in a state of potential within the frame. Courtesy of Process / Process (Chicago, IL), which commissioned the work as part of their editions program.

Abbey McBride will perform "Just Left From There" (2017-present) on May 14th at 6 PM. This piece serves as a playful and process-driven consideration of relationships we have with ourselves, our possessions, and each other. 

EFA Gallery is the exhibition space of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, dedicated to supporting artists at all stages of their practice and to presenting work that reflects the social, material, and political conditions shaping contemporary life. Rooted in EFA’s longstanding commitment to artists, experimentation and cultural sustainability, EFA Gallery serves as a platform for dialogue between artistic production, public engagement and the evolving role of artists within the city.

EXHIBITION MATERIALS

PRESS RELEASE (PDF)