Artist Statement

My practice begins with searching and inner foraging: a process of embodied listening through which feelings, memories, and unconscious knowledge move into visual form and action. As a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, video, and painting, artmaking is a way of metabolizing experience. I make work for people seeking connection—to themselves, to others, and to the complexity of being human. I am particularly interested in creating spaces where vulnerability, feeling, and reflection can be shared collectively. My belief is that art helps people reconnect with their embodied experience, question inherited narratives, and recognize their capacity for change. Through movement, materials, and mark making, I create works where the not-yet-known can emerge and be recognized. I think of this process as an exchange between the body, the material world, and a larger collective or ancestral consciousness. The resulting works often engage architecture, walking, labor, domestic space, and the perimeter as both a physical and psychological boundary.Living and working in Los Angeles, I draw inspiration from walking, observation, and the everyday environments I inhabit. These experiences become catalysts for performances, installations, and objects that explore transformation, belonging, memory, and the systems that shape our lives.Ultimately, I see art as a practice of attunement: one that transforms both the maker and the communities it touches.

More about the Artist:

Carmen Argote is a multidisciplinary artist whose work points to the body, class, and economic structures in relation to architecture and personal history. Argote’s practice draws upon their immediate environment and the networks of labor and consumption that mark these spaces. They manifest these connections through drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance that directly reference the visual language of abstraction.

Argote’s art-making begins with the process of searching, digesting, and conversing with the spaces and places they inhabit to understand their relationship between personal history, memory, cultural systems, and the collective psyche. Argote uses the action of walking to construct and develop the visual language of their work. The slowness of walking offers context to the scale of their body to a surrounding environment. They use photography and recordings as a way to visually capture fragments and gestural moments to bring into artworks.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Argote lives and works in Los Angeles and received their  MFA in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where they also received their BFA in 2004. Argote is the recipient of the City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Award (2024), City of Los Angeles Cultural Trailblazer Award (2023); the Fellows of Contemporary Art Award (2020); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019); the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2019); Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2015); Nancy Graves Foundation Artist Grant (2018); and awarded a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013). They are represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, California, and serve as co-chair of the Artist Council at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

Argote’s works are in private and public collections including: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Museum of Latin American Art Long Beach, El Museo del Barrio, New York.