Commonwealth and Council presents Holding, Carmen Argote’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. With renewed interest in the possibilities of play as a freeing act, Argote spent many months working in fitful experimentation from her home studio. Perceived bouts of failure begot new tactics of play: she destroyed dozens of works, hammering some to pieces, painting over rigorously developed canvases, even forcibly throwing what she deemed a completed work over a fence. Argote’s adoption of wildness into what she previously termed the “playspace” of art making led her back to her foundational preoccupations with material experimentation, bodily movement and constraint, and generative destruction/reconstruction. Into this iteration of the playspace, Argote invites the concept of “holding,” a term that resonates with the artist’s healing practices: holding the self, holding space, and being held.

As often quipped in psychoanalysis, the call to “look under the hood,” asks us to hold the self, hold space, and be held not merely for the sake of gaining equanimity, but for revelatory experience. The art, for Argote, potentiates movement in the playspace, envelopment around scarred surfaces, and contact between selves and others. Yet what we might wish to hold also falls apart: the body sitting or crouching on the canvas is seen only in its negative space; the artist/self is present everywhere in these works while also fragmented and disarticulated.

Patterned from the artist’s hallmark jumpsuit and sewn by her mother in an ongoing familial collaboration, Skin ego carries bronze figurines, each of which holds a yoga pose, in its pockets. Made from organza-like material, both sturdy and diaphanous, the jumpsuit alludes to the body as a projection of the self onto the art object. Echoing the resting bronzes pouched in the jumpsuit, the yoga poses affixed to the masks, illegible as such, resemble instead unmoveable growths occluding the skin, mouth, eyes, nose, and ears of the artist’s face.

Cast from the artist’s legs in a seated lotus pose, Crustaceous Supports centers the grounded body as emptied shells, a sloughed off vestige of meditation as creative act. Starting from the same crossed legged shape, Holding: the muscular skin and Holding: to make a chair contort the pose to near indecipherability, where knee becomes elbow, leg becomes arm, and the body is lost in its elevation from ground to pedestal, reaching toward the metaphysical.

In the works on canvas, Argote’s unidirectional squat in Sensual transferrings and Stimulated markings, and her pelvic grip on the floor in Seated breath, Seated abrasions, and Seated scrape uncover negative space and limit the reach of her facility for mark-making to compulsive repetitions of fingertips, searching hands around the base, stroking swaths of the forearm, and cringed scrapes of fingernails. Searching beyond these constraints, in Pigeon, the artist’s hands appear more fluid around her body. Resembling the pigmented handprints of the ancient rock art at the Cueva de las Manos, the artist’s body traces the primal resonance of hands, skin, movement, and time.

—Mary McGuire

Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA and BFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2007, 2004). Solo exhibitions have been held at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2022); Primary, Nottingham (2021); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2020); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2020, 2018); New Museum, New York (2019); and PAOS, Guadalajara (2019). Selected group exhibitions have been held at El Museo del Barrio, New York (2024); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); SculptureCenter, Queens (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and Ballroom Marfa (2017). Argote is a recipient of Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2019), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).

Argote’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Art Foundation; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach.