2022

Commonwealth and Council presents Her Forms of Other, a solo exhibition by Carmen Argote. Featuring new works from an ongoing series the artist calls Mother, Argote’s recent explorations combine child development and studio-based artmaking in sculptures formed in states of play and meditativeness. Play transpires without the expectation of an outcome; it is not a matter of success or failure. Argote lets the work take form, finding itself in her hands; and the artist finds herself.

Argote’s practice is characterized by site-informed actions of forage, salvage, and spatial exploration, refracted through her own body. The Mother series sees the site of Argote’s investigations shifting to her own psychic landscape. She considers how trauma manifests: generationally, somatically; turning inward to nurture the inner child and foster its development and healing. A series of sculptural “comforting objects” originated as a representation of the inner child, to be held and played with as means of healing the adult self, functioning also as a cathartic vessel for ritual actions—twisting, braiding, amalgamating. Argote imbues materials sourced from her daily life and walks throughout the city—her own clothing, found wood and natural debris, rubber bands—with psychological archetypes as a means of extracting, processing, and liberating the self from cycles of pain and violence.

These transitional objects represent Argote’s submission to a process in which her hands do the thinking. Their surprising, often anthropomorphic attitudes suggest the artist’s emotional or spiritual states, as well as the malleability of the materials. The Protectors drawings stand smeared with figs and crayon, implying the uninhibited expression of a child, but also building on Argote’s previous experiments using fruit and power bars to stain paper. The intertwined palm and linen fibers in Holding take a similar form, implying the careful carriage of a basket or sled.

The series furthers Argote’s integration of analysis through process, where the rituals of the studio glean and reshape vestiges of a life lived in the world. The series Dog on Fence, previously exhibited at Commonwealth and Council, reconciled the artist’s wanderings through her neighborhood with the sense of hyper awareness she felt walking alone, in drawings somewhere between finger paintings, body prints, and shadow puppets. Mother incorporates methods of dyeing, staining, and processing from previous works, such as a mound-shaped platform covered in canvas which the artist used to stain large linen sails by spilling paint down its sides, then repurposed the mother mold as a structure for living; or the “pocket” works of sewn linen stuffed with oxide-based pigment that oozes toward the floor in bright rivulets. Here, too, the artist coaxes the materials to take their own form. The present series deepens the sense of the artist’s studio and living space into a “temenos,” a space where one can truly be oneself. Materials like seashells or copper, historically the currency of trade and transactions, find a kind of rest. Nest for my father, a sculpture comprising feathers and motorcycle gear, offers a space for her father to land in the body of the work, which is also the artist’s self.