GAZELL.iO is the digital arm of Gazelli Art House, comprising an online Residency programme, NFT drops and collaborations, a dedicated Project Space, and a permanently installed VR Library — all in the heart of Mayfair.
Since 2015, the GAZELL.iO Residency has offered a unique insight into the environments of some of the most recognised and upcoming VR, AR, and digital artists. The four-week online Residency allows artists to take creative control, enabling them to showcase their artistic journey and interact with new and existing audiences directly.
In 2020, the Project Space was launched to allow artists to showcase their digital artworks in a physical space. By bridging the gap between the digital and physical, NFTs are dropped on the GAZELL.iO Marketplace in conjunction with the subsequent Project Space exhibition or artist Residency.
GAZELL.iO aims to bring pioneers of digital art and a new generation of artists to a broader audience through its dynamic exhibition and educational programme.
Ana Maria Caballero (b. 1981) is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits our societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticised motherhood and questioning notions that package female sacrifice as a virtue. The speakers in her poems find their voice by navigating the intellectual and the every day, daring to name what’s left unsaid in that all-important space of the home. Her poems are moments of private rebellion made public.
WAYS TO MISSPELL OBSIDIAN is a collection of spoken-word poems by Ana Maria Caballero that investigates and celebrates the storytelling potential of long-form poetry. Following the passing of a very close friend, Caballero composed JUAN, a eulogy-in-verse. This text serves as both precursor and companion to “Ways to Misspell Obsidian,” a lyric essay written years later in which details of Juan’s passing are braided into the story of the intoxication of Caballero’s young son with nail polish remover.
Caballero culled from the pages of her essay to create two standalone poems, FATHOMLESS and ONCE. Combined with JUAN, these works form a triptych of shared signification, recursion, imagery, and vocabulary in which rhyme, unexpected line breaks, and spacing are used to sketch the shadows of emotion.
Written in Caballero’s signature, straightforward style, the texts read like open heart surgery. The reader is welcome into the folds of each word as an active participant, searching for meaning via memory–but gently. Traumatic and commonplace events are woven together to show how bright bursts of significance hide in every moment of our lives.
Caballero’s poems don’t deliver tidy answers, and they are unapologetic about it. Instead, they invite the reader to sit beside meaning and discover how such proximity can suffice.
“Ways to Misspell Obsidian,” was a finalist for the Emerging Writer’s Contest hosted by Ploughshares, one of the most prestigious literary journals in the US. JUAN was written as a gift for Juan’s sister and is being published, as an artwork, by GAZELL.iO through their first-ever poetry reading at the gallery, on September 29th, 2022.