Glass Rice is proud to present Sanctuary, Nico Corona’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring sculptural jewelry, functional home goods, and abstract forms, the exhibition explores resilience, preservation, and transformation within Queer, Latinx, and immigrant communities. Sanctuary considers how objects can carry memory across generations, functioning simultaneously as protection, archive, and belonging.
Born in Pomona, California to Mexican and Bolivian-American parents, Corona draws upon a working-class upbringing shaped by resourcefulness, experimentation, and improvisation. As a self-taught metalworker, he approaches metal as both material and a way to archive—capable of preserving histories that have been systematically erased or overlooked. Metal becomes a response to this idea of erasure: a refusal of disappearance, and a bet on endurance. The question of “how will it live after me?” is a through-line in the exhibition for Corona—a pivotal inquiry into what remains when bodies, systems, and narratives shift, age, or disappear.
At the core of Corona’s practice is an ongoing curiosity and exploration of material. Sanctuary acts as a push against heteronormative frameworks and binary structures of gender. By recomposing forms, Corona embeds his resistance to assimilation within his processes. Chain link appears as a recurring material language: historically associated with containment, restriction, and industrial control, yet also deeply embedded in the visual and structural fabric of contemporary life. In Corona’s hands, it is reconfigured into static, sculptural conditions that go against what is expected of it. No longer something that binds, it becomes something held when remixed into a form that is familiar yet also unconventionally alluring.
Similarly, in the scorpion / cross pieces, where nature and manmade worlds collide in a charged juxtaposition of belief, violence, and survival, the work holds a form of tension without resolution. The scorpion—symbolic of Mexico, indigeneity, and of Corona’s paternal lineage—crawls across the cross, an emblem of imposed religious systems and colonial conversion. This collision produces a fragmented identity: an “aha” moment shaped by the lived experience of being a first-generation queer brown artist, and by the sudden clarity of colonial structures embedded within inherited culture.
Sanctuary also speaks to durability and fragility through metal and glass. For Corona, if metal holds memory through resistance and endurance, glass highlights another truth: delicate, volatile, and capable of sudden transformation. Orb-like forms emerge as one of the strongest structural gestures within the exhibition, even when rendered in a “fragile” material. When broken, glass fractures into something sharp, primal, irreversible. Together, these material tensions ask where strength actually lives—in what holds, or in what breaks.
Complementing the exhibition is El Santuario, an immersive installation curated in collaboration with Of Threads. Conceived as a shopable environment within the gallery, the installation brings together a curated collection of small functional objects and one-of-a-kind artworks honoring the strength, beauty, resilience, and cultural richness of the Mexican-American voice. Installed alongside Sanctuary, it expands the exhibition into a reverent space where objects become extensions of care, memory, and cultural continuity — qualities central to Corona’s practice, in which each object is imbued with a spiritually sacred essence, manifesting his passions, ideas, and memories through the body of work.
Born in Pomona, California to Mexican and Bolivian-American parents, Corona draws upon a working-class upbringing shaped by resourcefulness, experimentation, and improvisation. As a self-taught metalworker, he approaches metal as both material and a way to archive—capable of preserving histories that have been systematically erased or overlooked. Metal becomes a response to this idea of erasure: a refusal of disappearance, and a bet on endurance. The question of “how will it live after me?” is a through-line in the exhibition for Corona—a pivotal inquiry into what remains when bodies, systems, and narratives shift, age, or disappear.
At the core of Corona’s practice is an ongoing curiosity and exploration of material. Sanctuary acts as a push against heteronormative frameworks and binary structures of gender. By recomposing forms, Corona embeds his resistance to assimilation within his processes. Chain link appears as a recurring material language: historically associated with containment, restriction, and industrial control, yet also deeply embedded in the visual and structural fabric of contemporary life. In Corona’s hands, it is reconfigured into static, sculptural conditions that go against what is expected of it. No longer something that binds, it becomes something held when remixed into a form that is familiar yet also unconventionally alluring.
Similarly, in the scorpion / cross pieces, where nature and manmade worlds collide in a charged juxtaposition of belief, violence, and survival, the work holds a form of tension without resolution. The scorpion—symbolic of Mexico, indigeneity, and of Corona’s paternal lineage—crawls across the cross, an emblem of imposed religious systems and colonial conversion. This collision produces a fragmented identity: an “aha” moment shaped by the lived experience of being a first-generation queer brown artist, and by the sudden clarity of colonial structures embedded within inherited culture.
Sanctuary also speaks to durability and fragility through metal and glass. For Corona, if metal holds memory through resistance and endurance, glass highlights another truth: delicate, volatile, and capable of sudden transformation. Orb-like forms emerge as one of the strongest structural gestures within the exhibition, even when rendered in a “fragile” material. When broken, glass fractures into something sharp, primal, irreversible. Together, these material tensions ask where strength actually lives—in what holds, or in what breaks.
Complementing the exhibition is El Santuario, an immersive installation curated in collaboration with Of Threads. Conceived as a shopable environment within the gallery, the installation brings together a curated collection of small functional objects and one-of-a-kind artworks honoring the strength, beauty, resilience, and cultural richness of the Mexican-American voice. Installed alongside Sanctuary, it expands the exhibition into a reverent space where objects become extensions of care, memory, and cultural continuity — qualities central to Corona’s practice, in which each object is imbued with a spiritually sacred essence, manifesting his passions, ideas, and memories through the body of work.