Focus: Carmen Argote

The work of Los Angeles-based artist Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico) is distinguished by her commitment to process and her characteristic use of organic and biological materials—from bananas and palm fronds to chicken excrement and human urine. Often collected on her daily walks, these materials are reconstituted into artworks through the ritual actions of braiding, rubbing, and consuming, which speak in significant ways to the artist’s relationship to body and place. Argote’s most recent series, titled Mother, brings these site-specific investigations inward.

Including drawings, sculptures, and works in process, Argote’s featured exhibition at ICA LA—I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe—maps the artist’s journey toward a deeper understanding of her interior self and the binaries that it holds—adult and child, man and woman, resident and exile, individual and collective. Since the exhibition opened in June, Argote has visited the space nearly every day. Whether alone, or with one of her collaborators, these visits have often resulted in changes to the installation, including an expanding line of eggs along the gallery floor, a new series of hand-written notes directly on the gallery wall, and books carefully placed in conversation with different artworks.

Expanding on her existing walking practice, Argote makes her way to ICA LA from her Boyle Heights home every day. She marks this journey with the offering of a single egg from one of her chickens, all of which are named after a famous artist, such as Daniel Joseph Martinez, Mike Kelley, Agnes Martin, and Adrian Piper—to name a few. Etched in pencil on each egg is the name of the chicken that laid it. Tending to the chicken flock has played a significant role in Argote’s journey of re-mothering, enabling her to appreciate a newfound relationship to the individual and the collective and to value the learnings of non-human life forms.

On view near the eggs is a new series of wall markings made by Argote with colored pencil. Added in July, these notes offer insights into the artist’s experience of her artworks outside the context of her studio and within the museum.

Books are also scattered throughout the galleries as part of Argote’s ongoing collaboration with friend and art historian Mary McGuire. Together, they selected the books from McGuire’s personal library, brought them to ICA LA, and placed them to be in dialogue with particular artworks. Functioning almost like footnotes or extended labels, the publications and their selected excerpts elaborate on the ideas and practices that ground the works on view. Slowly, over the remainder of the presentation, all of the books will be bound with rope into stacks to once again return to McGuire’s home.

In addition to McGuire, Argote has also invited her mother, Carmen Vargas, as well as Young Chung, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, and C?dric Tai to be in collaboration with her over the course of the exhibition. You can find a full schedule of their upcoming actions on the ICA LA website here and don’t miss a final program with all of the collaborators on Wednesday, September 6!