Bodies of Work
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Be Loved
Be loved is part of an expansive new project encompassing video, sound, objects, and works on paper. The project began by addressing how patriarchal violence is perpetuated, and the impact this had on her grandmother, father, mother, and her own notion of self. Through a process of searching and digesting, this has developed into a […]
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A Cosmic Language
The works in this series are mostly made from gathered and reworked pizza boxes collected from neighbors’ trash cans in Boyle Heights. From these materials, a growing body of forms have developed, including accordion folded books of linked boxes, sculptural pizzas “reconstituted” onto clean white t-shirts, and the Cosmic Backpacks.
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For Florence
For Florence is an action I created that began as an idea/ voice memo while walking at Lincoln Park. The boat ramp, and site of the action, is located in front of the Florence Nightingale statue. During the pandemic, my bodily boundaries shifted. limited access to public and private restrooms and my frequent walks in public […]
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Last Light: Clockshop
Visit: https://clockshop.org/project/last-light/ for film trailer, interview and more Shot during the first wave of the pandemic, the artist Carmen Argote’s first film, Last Light, is a meditation on walking and memory in Los Angeles. Argote describes her walking habit as synonymous with thinking, a way of taking in and digesting the conditions of her environment. […]
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Glove Hand Dog: Commonwealth and Council
Film Process: The film making process has felt familiar and a natural extension and continuation of my practice. The act of walking and of searching within the city, the act of taking pictures with my phone and recoding voice memos of incoming ideas and thoughts, and generally of taking notice of moments, have constructed the […]
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Dog Glove Hand: Stairwell Gallery
Rxbars-going going gone My initial interest in using the Rxbars came from a feeling of my own attraction to them and my consumption of this food. Their branding, their design of their packaging, their positioning among health food and their perceived transparency in the listing of the contents compelled me to buy and consume them. […]
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Searching For The Willow Pattern
Argote’s latest body of work investigates the exchange of goods, aesthetics, and culture through historical trade routes. Sculp- tural paintings of raw linen standing tall in looped folds evoke skyscrapers, and their pockets (resembling rows of windows or balconies) are poured and pressed with colorants. The paintings and accompanying works on paper painted with unfired […]
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Me At Market
Carmen Argote: Me At Market Carmen Argote’s practice draws upon her immediate environment and the networks of labor and consumption that mark these spaces. She manifests these connections through site-specific sculpture, installation, and performance. Her choice of natural materials—cochineal, citrus fruit, avocados, wine, and coffee—directly reference histories of labor, violence, oppression, and colonialism through the […]
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As Above, So Below at the New Museum
At the heart of her interdisciplinary practice is a continuous conversation between her own physical form and the location in which she is working—often responding to the various cultural, economic, personal, and historical narratives within a particular site. Informed by this dialogue, many of her works bare vestiges of her body’s interactions with its environment. […]
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Mounds-made in France during a residency at Launch Pad LaB
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Nutrition For A Better Life (Compre Chatarra)
In Nutrition For A Better Life (Compre Chattara), Carmen Argote’s practice focuses on Istanbul and its modes and signs of exchange. Lately, Carmen has been interested in the mechanics of trade and the recalibration of systems of value; she is searching for a visual language about the movement of merchandise as it relates to the […]
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Works on Paper -made in France durring a residency at Launch Pad LaB
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Manéjese Con Cuidado
MANÉJESE CON AMOR CUIDADO PAOS GDL 27 de abril de 2019 En meses recientes la artista Carmen Argote ha realizado algunos viajes. Estos empiezan a permear en su trabajo de la misma forma en que su entendimiento de la arquitectura le ha permitido construir una red de conexiones en busca de un lenguaje propio. La […]
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Taller Los Guayabos Series
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Las Cargadas
Las Cargadas is a title that points to the accumulation of the objects on the backpacks, to the weight of our shared histories and traumas, to our visual languages, interpretations and transformations and to our accumulation of memories growing out of the process of walking the streets of Madrid for three weeks. The project concluded […]
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Sistemas Caprichosos
I made these works inside a domestic space, and I think that this has a profound influence on the works. The lived in quality becomes a conversation between the arrangements made by the person who lives there and their temperament. This along with the intentions of the architecture and the economic structure that it occupies […]
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Warm is a Black
Ballon Rouge Collective is proud to present our first New York project, Warm is a Black, by Carmen Argote. Curated by Kathy Battista, Warm is a Black presents new work by Argote including a series of paintings and a large, floor-based sculpture that commands the space. The exhibition is the culmination of the artist living […]
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The Artist, having used all her money to make the work, lives in the mother-mold of her sculpture
Commonwealth and Council presents Carmen Argote’s The Artist, having used all her money to make the work, lives in the mother-mold of her sculpture.—an exhibition which builds directly upon the remains of her contribution to Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum, Filtration System for a Process Based Practice. Walking around Eastlake in Lincoln […]
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Deterioro Y Poder
Carmen Argote & Mandy El-Sayegh at Instituto de Vision notes about my work All the work is responding to Bogota and all the work was conceived and made here. It started with looking at the mapa topográfico. I became fascinated by the object because it was a translation of the landscape in relationship to scale […]
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Filtration System for a Process Based Practice
Filtration System for a processed Based Practice
The fiberglass sculpture has a painted linen cover whose marks are a direct result of painting fabric circles on its flat top. The form is both a workspace, a sculpture, a painting and its own documentation. The work is based on an actual concrete cover/ island that conceals a filtration system at the man-made lake at my neighborhood park. I imagined myself atop this concrete mound, reconstructed the “island” to scale in the confines of my studio, where it becomes a sculptural work space offering me a new vantage point on the economics of my artistic practice.
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If only it were that easy… (ongoing)
Mentors and Collaborators: Nancy Popp, Bill Kelley Jr, Eva Perez, Anuradha Vikram, Alexandra Grant, Dean Erdmann, and Tim Brown.
I invited artist who are/ or were once motorcycle riders to teach me about the phycological aspects of motorcycling. Each rider shared stories about their outlook on riding and how motorcycling has shaped their perspective in life. Personal histories intertwined as we practiced riding drills over the architectural layout painted in chalk on the parking lot floor of both my childhood home and my father’s house. The audience was able to hear our intimate conversations through our helmet microphones hooked up to speakers. The work focused on learning as a form of artistic process.
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Pyramids
Pyramids is a solo exhibition by Carmen Argote that includes a large scale new sculptural installation, drawings and video that engage questions surrounding distorted notions of luxury and value. Argote uses poor materials in this work, ripped cardboard, coffee grounds, pine needles, to reflect upon economic mobility, labor, and the potential of sculpture as a […]
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Tierra.Sangre.Oro.
Series of works made for Rafa Esparza’s exhibition Tierra.Sangre.Oro. at Ballroom Marfa. The exhibition includes new installation, performance, and sculptural work from Esparza alongside collaborations and contributions from artists Nao Bustamante, Beatriz Cortez, Timo Fahler, Eamon Ore-Giron, and Star Montana.
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Place On-Fold
Place On-Fold is a work comprised of eight 24 feet x 24 feet hand painted muslin fabrics that hang over 20 feet high on railings. The pavilion space, the site where the work is situated, exists as a space in constant transition. It is a rental venue for weddings and parties, was once a […]
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Workbook/Notebook
The Armory’s La Casita 805 N. Madison Ave., Pasadena, CA 91104 Each sign that comprises the Workbook Installation is a poem, created by separating the answers from my grandmothers ESL workbooks from the questions and prompts printed on the text. In this way, I hope to reveal the poems as representative of the individual, of […]
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live/work 2008-2016
Live/Work is a zigzagging screen-like structure that I have used to divide my living space from my work space during the last 8 years. The accumulated arrangements of photos and papers on both sides of the structure surface are the mapping of my identity. On it, you can see the organic circulation of negotiations between cultures […]
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Alex’s Room
An intimate collaboration between siblings, Carmen takes arrangement as social action to render an interdimensional portrait of her sister, Alejandra Argote, who surrounds herself with a menagerie of signifiers that embraces discursive timelines and economies of taste. Through successive arrangements of objects from her collection, Alex shares a wealth of visuality inflected with an idiosyncratic […]
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Staircase Dresses and other clothes-like sculptures
Materials: Acrylic on muslin, thermoplastic, cardboard armature and coffee pots. The staircase in my visual language represents a preexisting structure. In this work, I created a garment / cover so as to transform the structure enough to make it more familiar. I was thinking about how stark and cold foldout chairs/ structures can be, and […]
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Arrangement of Wares: Paintings
These works are created horizontally and are inspired by the compositions created by street venting. With these works, I am interested in organizing a composition outside of the western conventions of painting, and drawing inspiration from the way street vendors compose as it relates to body and to the intimate exchange of objects. When a […]
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Folding Structures (2017)
This series of folding structures grew from an earlier set of sculptures shown as part of Houses he wanted to build, 2015. The earlier set was destroyed by me. Made with a cardboard core, these earlier versions folded muslin fabric to the size of clothing in a drawer. The first series began in my Laundromat, where […]
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Mansión Magnolia
In 1936, philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin stated, “Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight.” By developing habitual interactions within Mansión Magnolia—through time, movement, and the process of photographic documentation—Argote has come to understand the values inherent in this architecture, and the impact […]
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Houses he wanted to build / Folding Structures
Using fabric, I painted an interpretation of my father’s architectural drawings of houses he wanted to build in Mexico, which he created when we immigrated to LA. I also layered a 1:1 graphite rubbing of the actual house underneath, to create a new and imagined facade. The work addressed how I feel about the possibility […]
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A Vast Furniture
I came to the Schindler House first as a visitor, walking the perimeter of the house as it exists now, a historic architectural space. Through subsequent visits I came to know the space and proposed a project that would involve a sculptural tracing of the walking perimeter at a 1:1 scale. I wanted to use […]
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Mantas
My father’s side of home I covered the walls and floor of the room I was staying in at Mansion Magnolia with muslin fabric. Muslin fabric being a material that moves through economic classes in Mexico, artisanal and working class. I traced everything that was touching the walls and floor. I painted the fabric and […]
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Handball Painting
I loved playing handball all through elementary school, I would get home and would imagine myself continuing to play handball on the wall of the driveway ally.
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720 Sq. Feet: Household Mutations
720 sq. ft.: Household Mutations, is the culmination of a two-part installation. This exhibition explores spatial memorization and the relational complexities of interior vs. exterior, private vs. public and positive vs. negative spaces.
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On Inhabiting
A recent series of works on inhabiting, using photographs taken at Mansion Magnolia in Guadalajara, Mexico. All are gouache on photographs. 2014
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Polyscapes
This series of photographs grew out of my exploration of experiencing an absence in the hills across my studio in Lincoln Heights. Working through fragments of historical photos and narratives about a movie studio and theme park that once stood adjacent to these hills in the 1910’s, I felt compelled to return to these hills […]
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Selig Zoo
A Zoo and Movie Studio once stood across my studio in Lincoln Heights in the 1920s. By collecting fragments of history and images in response to a curiosity about why this stretch on Mission Rd. felt strangely vacant and ghostly, I began to uncover the story of Colonel William Selig. Selig was a man with […]
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Earlier Performances and Explorations
Performances in and around the Los Angeles Landscape.
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Portraits of Spaces
A short series of works that explore the portraiture of lofts, buildings, and other architecture features.
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MFA Series
My MFA thesis exhibition at the UCLA New Wight Gallery, 2007.
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2011-2012 Formal Explorations
Mesh on mesh sculpted into cylindrical-like cages and chicken-wire hexagons suspended on canvas by magnetic forces. This collection of works explore gravity, drawing, surface and form.