Jesús Hilario-Reyes Merges Nightlife and Ecology in Slip Index

Jesús Hilario-Reyes, a Puerto Rican artist and resident DJ at Nowadays in New York under the alias MORENXXX, challenges conventional notions of individual and community through a practice blending performance, installation, objects, and expanded cinema. His recent MFA thesis exhibition at Yale, Slip Index (2025), transfers elements of rave culture—such as strobe lights, fog machines, and dance floors—into the white cube, exploring collective memory and the absence of sound. Works like Nowadays (2025) feature a dance floor temporarily installed at the eponymous club, then moved to a gallery with traces of dancers. Dishonest Dancers activates strobes and fog every thirty minutes, inspired by a religious painting from a Puerto Rican church. Holy Ghosted (2025) combines mangrove roots with deformed church organ fragments. Hilario-Reyes engages with queer and radical Black thought, citing Edouard Glissant's opacity and mobility, Legacy Russell's fabulation, and Esteban Munoz's queer politics. He references Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower to frame current crises of inequality, economic collapse, and climate change, emphasizing collective interdependence. His interdisciplinary, or "antidisciplinary," approach prioritizes music as key to forming communities.