COLA 2025

Carmen Argote: 

Outside In

Carmen Argote’s COLA installation invites visitors to engage with various sensory experiences, including the smell of pine needles, the intermittent sounds of rolling concrete cylinders, and the images of bodies and objects moving across a three-channel video. Argote conceived the installation from a dream she had soon after her mother moved in with her to her home studio. Central to the installation, the three-channel video includes montages of the artist, her mother (also named Carmen), and her sister Alex lying on the home studio floor, a palimpsest of smears, splatters, handprints, and footprints of paint from Argote’s studio practice. The work is thus rooted in dreaming, memory, childhood fantasies, familial relationships, and the “play” of art making.

In various states of dress and undress, Carmen, Carmen, and Alex pose as if at rest or asleep, holding one another, and reaching out to gently touch a head, a hand, or a hip. In one shot, all three form a spoon shape, skin upon skin; in another, Argote wraps her arms around her mother’s torso, holding her close; and in another, she turns away from her sister, as if in their shared childhood bed, and masturbates. Challenging white heteropatriarchal ideologies of the nuclear family, Argote asks us to imagine the ways in which families engage intimacy and tenderness otherwise, be it in structures of cohabitation, dynamics of care, or systems of support amongst family of origin, queer family, or other forms of chosen family.

The home, the park, and the cityscape enter the space in condensed forms. The video work, framing the home studio, rests on the floor surrounded by pine needles that trace the shape of the gallery. Argote gathered the pine needles from the perimeter of Barnsdall Park, bringing reference to the exhibition site and its exterior inside. Concrete testing cylinders, which Argote found in her back yard, sit idly in their minimalism in the gallery space; the same cylinders roll through segments of the video. Concrete cylinders, for Argote, have a particular resonance with Los Angeles, especially its East Side neighborhoods. Argote has long been preoccupied by the Los Angeles cityscape, its architectural spaces, and the discarded materials of its streets. During her walking practice, which she has cultivated over many years living in the neighborhoods of Lincoln Park and Boyle Heights, she noticed the ubiquity of concrete cylinders and the ways in which people repurposed them for plant beds, fences, or stairs. Argote sees such forms and their uses as part of what she calls the “visual language of place,” a concept that echoes throughout her oeuvre. 

The language of place is inextricable from the bodies that dwell within it. In another component of the installation, a textile made of high visibility screen mesh hangs over the window in the gallery. This same material appears in the video work in the form of a jumpsuit worn by the artist. This is the first time Argote has taken up sewing. In the past, it was her mother’s hand who helped her with the sewn components of her work. Since living with her mother over the past several months, she has now learned the skill herself, taught by her mother who in turn was taught by her mother. To make the textile, Argote sewed hundreds of pockets out of the mesh material and placed a handful of pine needles in each one. The pine needles sit in their pockets secured and exposed, contained and piercing through, obscured and on view, inside the gallery and up against the window to the outside. Argote works with perimeters, pockets, frames, and cylinders not to restrict, measure, and test, but rather to recognize the shifts, porosity, and vulnerability inherent in our relationships to others and to the world.

-Mary McGuire

Installation Pictures by: Kara Leigh Kirk
Cinematography by: Audrey Medrano