About the Piece

Workbook is an installation situated throughout the exterior garden at La Casita, the Armory’s community learning annex, where Argote will arrange over fifty white plastic signs that feature a series of handwritten verse. The presentation is inspired by the writings on the whiteboard inside La Casita, used predominantly by ESL learners, and extracted written text from her grandmother’s English grammar workbooks.

Notebook, an exhibition in the Armory’s Pasadena Art Alliance Gallery, features Argote’s 3D model of La Casita along with a book of retraced writings from her grandmother’s spiral notebook used during her own ESL education. Unlike the standardized nature of the grammar workbooks, the project’s source notebook is more personalized, containing phone numbers of the artist’s grandmother’s friends, birthdays, and other intimate notes in Spanish. The work offers a layering of two distinct experiences and questions what is lost in an attempt to retrace what has been done before.

http://www.armoryarts.org/exhibitions/exhibitions-2016/argote/

Press release here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CRt7RqzIxRf8WH5mEG-fVBvz9RRW-_-Lh4FSPmtMPfo/edit