Carmen Argote: Soft Perimeter

Silverlens New York

For Carmen Argote’s debut solo gallery show in 2010, she exhibited a 720-square-foot carpet that once covered the floors of her childhood home in Los Angeles, hanging it from the ceiling in the manner of a monumental tapestry. She painted most of the carpet white, leaving a wide strip of the original chestnut brown around the edges; over time, stains from years past bled through the paint, like memories slowly returning to the surface of consciousness.

Many of the formal, material, and conceptual concerns of 720 Sq. Feet: Household Mutations return, refined and elaborated, in the work gathered together for “Soft Perimeter,” Argote’s first solo gallery show in New York. The sculptural object that gives the exhibition its title, Soft perimeter of home (2026), similarly maps a domestic interior: the hybrid home and studio the adult Argote shares with her mother (a frequent collaborator) and a handful of chickens (also collaborators), a space where art making is just one activity among many that sustain the artist’s daily life. Every nook and cranny is filled with personal effects commingled with works-in-progress; it’s this premium on available space that led Soft perimeter of home to wind up coiled on Argote’s bed, taking on the loose infinity shape that it now occupies on the gallery floor. What once traced the edges of the artist’s home has collapsed in self-embrace, its twists and softness calling up the body more acutely than the rigid geometry of architecture. 

The foam guts of Soft perimeter of home are externalized and made grotesque in a series of objects, all from 2026, made in part from a foraged foam mattress that Argote originally thought had once belonged to a romantic partner. Building on her earlier “comforting objects,” small figural sculptures of bundled and knotted organic and found materials, the more recent foam works also employ braiding and binding to create dense forms, but in this case they evoke matter metabolized and expelled—matter of the body rather than a surrogate for the body.

Unlike the earlier comforting objects, these works are unified by Argote’s use of cochineal, a deep red dye harvested from insects, whose usage dates back to the Mayans and Aztecs. When mixed with lemon juice, the dye shifts to vibrant orange, scarlet, gray, and violet, a viscerally intense palette with associations of sun, blood, passion, and death. A number of titles in the series—Matchstick, Please fireweed, Yes Firebasket—reference fire, a force of nature both destructive and sanctifying. Where the comforting objects strongly relate to Argote’s larger project of re-mothering her inner child, the more recent sculptures suggest chemical transformation, nodding to the 2025 wildfires that forever changed the physical and psychological landscape of Los Angeles, and willing, through forms compacted and enclosed, their containment. Twin works on paper, where is the match that sparked the entire terrain (2026), extend the impulse toward control, with even brushstrokes of crimson cochineal creating an allover field of color that envelops the viewer, containing us in the bodily and psychic experience of encounter. 

Cochineal, itself derived from a non-human body, constitutes the corporeal throughline of “Soft Perimeter.” Argote imagines the dye as “almost like a body,” behaving similarly to “all kinds of secretions, like hormones and different chemicals, which shift and change our mood.” Me at Market (2020), a monumentally scaled work on linen, embodies both the excess of secretion and the magic of material metamorphosis. The work is narrow and impossibly long, much like the intestinal Soft perimeter of home, but with vastly different appearances on recto and verso, not unlike a body. The “front” is dotted with a grid of linen pockets—similar to those sewn on the artist’s signature jumpsuits, several of which appear in Dream Sequence—that Argote filled with cochineal and lemon juice, allowing the liquid to bleed downward, leaving behind neat lines of pigment that link one pocket to the next and so on. The “back” of the work is its more chaotic underbelly, where dye and acid swirl in dark mottled pools, beautiful and gruesome all at once. Argote’s orderly pockets—cut and sewn by her mother—suggest holding, harboring, and keeping; but sometimes what is meant to be carried cannot be contained, instead seeping outward, inward, and through, changing everything in its path. 

— Andrea Gyorody

 

This Work Said No
carmen argote

Part 1

This work said no.
It said,

let me be as I am,
let me be relaxed.

Don’t try to tie me up
or put cochinilla on me.
Don’t make me into something
that I’m not.

What are you?

I am as I am.
Leave me alone.
I am enough.

Soft Perimeter of Home
is the delineation
of my childhood home.

I wanted to move
from something rigid
to something soft and malleable,
with the capacity for change.

This home shape
holds my mother,
my sister,
and I

holding each other.

I wanted to make
a loving piece.

My sister and I
are 7 years apart—

sharing a room,
sharing a bed?

How do I hold on to my sensuality,
my sexuality,
with you there

I live with my mother now
and we continue

our relating

in this soft perimeter
of home.

---

Part 2

Compress.

I want you to gather—
turn in the stomach.

Stomach-turning moments.

Why are you still so pretty?

We were hiding.
Crouching under a desk.

I’ll choke you into shape.
Allow the secretions to leak.

Dip you in cochinilla.
Submerge you.

Let the sensations surface.

Secretions leak—
shift
and shift
and
move.

I wanted the transference
of this shape
into this shape.

---

Part 3

You’re here.

I’m so happy
that you’re here.

You’ve taught me so much about
reconfiguration,
adaptation,
iteration.

Me at market?
Are you at market?

How do we transform?

Here you are—
a long scroll
dividing up the space,
cut up to fit.

I’ve poured lemon and cochinilla
into your pockets.

My mom sewed you up.

Rock-like.

Your back,
a landscape.
Geological.

And you remind me
of this landscape—

Sensations change.

Rock-like
and soft.

Feeling-function.

It’s good to see you.

---

Part 4

I didn’t know
you were finished.

This insect tea
speaks really loud.

And these layers
of lemon and cochinilla
ignite—

fire.
Sensations.

All that matters
is what is sensed
in the body.

And this body—
is sensing
the many bodies
of this landscape.

Your seam.
Body.

And I wanted
to cover you up.

Layers
of lemon
and cochinilla.

---

Part 5

you surprised me

Your cage
that hugs
and chokes

projection
protection

safe, silent

the shape
of the spaces
that contain us
become tightened

silencing
sensations

and here
the red
emerges
as architecture

---

Part 6

Bring me back (lower)

Bring me back

to the softening
of the hard edges—

here
in the home space,

the place
of secretions
and sensations.

The work said,

no—
let me be as I am,
let me be relaxed.

I am enough.