CONSUELO WISE // b o y

On view June 10–July 12, 2026
Opening reception & reading Wednesday, June 10 (7–9pm)

How to demand of composition that its contrivance come apart, but leave the pieces intact?
How might I live death all the way to the edge of its form?
—Rusty Morrison

Nationale is pleased to present b o y, a new immersive installation built for the Project Room around a long-form poem by Consuelo Wise.

As the first of three exhibitions presented this summer around themes of death, mourning, and memory, b o y explores what happens when loss exceeds language and understanding. For Nationale curator May Barruel, the project returns to a more personal approach to programming, guided by emotion and intuition, and focused here on grief, remembrance, and the ways art can help us live alongside what cannot be resolved.

The installation is entered through sheer curtains that separate it from the main gallery. Inside, a continuous recording of Wise reading the poem plays on a loop, alongside a faded family photograph printed on translucent chiffon, the image surviving only through reproduction and creating a ghostly oscillation between presence and absence. Wise’s voice fills the compact space, shaping the poem through shifts in emphasis, pacing, and rhythm. She becomes at once author, performer, and conductor of the listener’s experience.

While the poem utilizes repetition, fragmentation, and syntax to construct a form that repeatedly falls apart, the installation moves between sound and image and together, they pry open memories that resist understanding but refuse to be forgotten.

Consuelo Wise is a Guatemalan-American poet and visiting scholar in the Creative Writing Department at Portland State University. b o y , from which this installation is drawn, is her first book (Omnidawn, 2024).