Puerto Rico exists in a state of flux: neither a state nor an independent country, it perennially struggles within the specter of the U.S. Its economy languishes due to the loss of federal tax provisions, unrelenting natural disasters that devastate critical infrastructure with little relief, massive mismanagement on the part of its own domestic government, and ballooning debt. Portraying the hell of colonialism has been the labor of many a great artist, the best of which take the aspects of their home country and the colonizer and use them as a prism through which to convey a distorted reality. Such is the case with a young Puerto Rican photographer and multimedia artist named Kevin Quiles Bonilla, who is currently showing a series of photographs and prints at Baxter St. Camera Club of New York.

Bonilla's photography work focuses on the Puerto Rican diaspora, plumbing the depths of his country's consciousness to tell the story of their colonial past. His photographs routinely pair natural beauty with imagery of oppression and incursion, where under the veneer of Puerto Rico's bustling tourism industry lies something far more sinister. His idiosyncratic visual style blends the natural with the artificial; Carryover, Bonilla’s series of photographs, features a man draped in a blue FEMA tarp on both Governors Island and his native San Juan, while artworks made from beach towels depict a battered town not far from the capital alongside tropical imagery, emblematic of post-Hurricane Maria relief that never materialized.

Bonilla’s artwork transcends a variety of mediums but his predominant focus recently has been photography. Aesthetically, many of the photographs feature the artist obscured by a blue FEMA tarp, the ones provided to people whose homes (including those of Bonilla’s family) had been ravaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017. In one of his more arresting images, Bonilla is fully shrouded in a blue tarp braving the wind on the Puerto Rican coastline. Though many of his photographs contain colonial structures, sand is a crucial motif throughout much of his work. It’s ephemeral, and washes away, much like the culture of an island that has been stripped of so much under its status in relation to the colonial incurring in its daily life.

Like many great young artists with strong ties to their homeland, Bonilla is inspired by those who remark on their native land in powerful ways. Bonilla cites Ana Mendieta - the legendary Cuban-American performance artist and sculptor - as one of his primary influences. Bonilla’s aforementioned Carryover series is immediately reminiscent of Mendieta’s seminal photograph, Blood + Feathers (1974, pictured above). Both are portraits of young artists immolating themselves, one using suffocation, the other, blood, to jar the audience (though Mendieta’s photographs are a bit more terrifying in their raw power). Bonilla’s series is a more tempered version, one perhaps more satirical and biting in its subtlety than outright gruesome and gory. Influences are crucial for Bonilla, but his style is somewhat idiosyncratic. He wants his motifs to stand alone, and to not be compared to other artists just because they too inherit similarly difficult colonial legacies.

Islotes, also on view at the show, is Bonilla’s attempt to make sand an object of permanence. Bonilla went into the photographic archives of his grandmother’s home in rural Puerto Rico, which yielded hundreds of photos nearly ruined by hurricanes past and present. The photos reveal a collection of relatives both dear and lesser known; dinner parties, beach days, pivotal births and deaths codified on film. As the only member of his family living in New York (he’s had several residencies here, the most recent of which is at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City), Bonilla finds his art to be a way of adding a level of endurance to he and his family. By using adhesive, the artist forms mounds over the characters of the photographs, pouring more or less sand based on how much he wants the viewer to see. A photograph of his grandmother has a thin sheen of sand, allowing us a slight peek into the veil of a private life that would never otherwise be known, while others are buried in the sand completely.

Bonilla’s work also provides a unique commentary on the deleterious tourism industry which is so synonymous with Puerto Rico and its pristine beaches. It came out of nowhere is a triptych of beach towels with overlaid graphics; the text evokes the gift shops which line the streets of San Juan, while its imagery tells a story of a paradise not so far from slums, hurricanes, and trees shorn by unrelenting winds. Bonilla is also mindful of how he presents the beach towels. In his last exhibit, he placed the towels in a room filled with sand. This time however, he’s posted them on wooden planks, hoping to call to mind the presentation of beach towels at the roadside shops in Puerto Rico where they are typically sold. Here is an artist who layers irony not only in the artwork but in the presentation of it itself, as though we are the greedy tourists shopping for beach towels in a seaside town too far from home.

Prior to his show at the Camera Club, Bonilla had been honing his “colonial satire” with the incredible sculptural piece For centuries, and still…(anticipated completion). This work shows a guard tower that is a recreation of one of the old colonial fortresses of Old San Juan, but instead constructed from NYC construction materials. The haphazardly-spray painted “POST NO BILLS” imagines a world where colonialism and cosmopolitanism meet in strange ways.

For Bonilla, being a queer person, a person with a disability, and a migrant plays heavily into his artistic work. What this young photographer and artist leaves us with is not just the story of a post-colonial reckoning, but also one of preserving precious family memories. All of this, as Bonilla puts it, is “in the pursuit of re-signification”, an attempt at taking a macroscopic view of a body like his “transiting between Puerto Rico (the colony) and the US (the ‘mainland’).