September 13 - October 12, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, September 13 from 4-8pm at Halsey McKay Brooklyn, 60 Greenpoint Ave, Brooklyn
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Chozick Family Art Gallery and Halsey McKay are thrilled to present I PREFER SUNRISE BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A HAPPY ENDING, a solo exhibition of new works by Orlando Estrada. The exhibition will be on view at Halsey McKay’s Brooklyn location.

Estrada is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His practice spans sculpture, painting, drawing, and installation, weaving together themes of post-naturalism, identity, and the human condition. Estrada’s work investigates the mythologies of 21st century American culture through the lenses of queer theory, mysticism, and science fiction. Influenced by his childhood on a military base in Puerto Rico and his adolescence in Miami, Estrada’s work is deeply rooted in how we understand our place within nature, time, and history.

In this exhibition, Estrada presents six new works that grapple with the passage of time, religion, and the shifting landscape of American politics. At the center of the show is a dismantling of colonialist thought through the deconstruction of Catholic iconography.

Two new low-relief sculptures extend Estrada’s ongoing series of dreamlike terrains that merge synthetic and organic materials. One depicts a sunrise viewed through a clearing in a forest, offering a potential point of origin for the exhibition’s narrative, while its counterpart—a deconstructed clock with numbers scattered across the surface—suggests the instability of how we measure each day. These works echo both the collapse of long-standing social systems and the elastic perception of time in the face of relentless news cycles and inherited histories.

Other works further Estrada’s engagement with cultural and religious symbolism. A small replica of Jasper Johns’s Three Flags is reimagined, covered with dripping black ink, an allegory for the fraying ideals of national identity. A large sumi ink and lithographic crayon painting of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden - depicting a metaphorical fall from grace.

Perhaps most pointedly, a found wooden crucifix with a gold Christ figure has been mechanized to rotate like the hands of a clock. At times upright and at times inverted, the piece destabilizes a potent Christian symbol, interrogating cycles of life and death, the irony of moral authority, and the hypocrisy of religious nationalism. The use of found objects has been important throughout Estrada’s career as a way to reframe cultural signifiers, and draw new meaning from familiar
forms.

The exhibition culminates in a portrait of Estrada’s grandfather in military uniform, a personal reflection on assimilation, cultural memory, and the negotiation of identity across generations. The work ties Estrada’s dismantling of religious and political symbols back to an intimate lens, reminding viewers that these critiques are lived, embodied, and deeply personal.

Together, the works in I PREFER SUNRISE BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A HAPPY ENDING invite us to reconsider inherited systems—religious, political, and familial—and toimagine what might come after their unraveling.

Orlando Estrada (b. 1986, Puerto Rico) has an MFA from the University of Florida, and a BFA from Florida International University. He has presented solo and two artist exhibitions at Halsey McKay Gallery, Rachel Uffner Gallery, the Miami Beach Convention Center, and Bas Fisher Invitational. In 2025 his work was included in RicanVisions: Global Ancestralities and Embodied Futures, The Latinx Project at NYU. Estrada lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Hours: Open by appointment
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For more information and to set up an appointment please contact ryan@halseymckay.com or
rebekah@chozickfamilyartgallery.com