In 2020, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art demolished its original campus. The institution that had spent decades gathering fragments from elsewhere became a source of fragmentation itself. Cayetano Ferrer gathered remnants from the rubble: sections of tile, pieces of concrete, shards of the modernist columns that once organized the building. These fragments are the material of Object Prosthetics, Ferrer’s second solo exhibition at Commonwealth and Council.

The works comprise a modular system of aluminum armatures with linear-motion sliders. Architectural rubble rests within these supports, held by conspicuous pins and threaded rods. The apparatus of care, here, is inseparable from constraint: what holds also binds, what supports also immobilizes. Where conventional display infrastructure claims neutrality, Ferrer's armatures announce themselves, adopting the visual language of institutional display and altering it to create a mirror that reflects the system's operations back to itself.

Resin components interface between object and support, their lattice-like geometries shifting between opacity and translucence. Against the mechanistic precision of extruded aluminum, these interfaces possess an almost corporeal quality. The petroleum-based resin carries a material resonance with the site adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits, linking the prosthetic forms to the ground from which the fragments came. The fragments are positioned according to their assumed original orientation, made possible by the interfaces.

The track posts can be repositioned over the course of the exhibition, proposing display as dynamic rather than fixed. The exhibition is structured as a temporary gathering, held together against the pressures of dispersal. The fragments carry with them an aura of their original location. Ferrer's work occupies the liminal space between presence and absence, between memory and material fact.

Cayetano Ferrer (b. 1981, Honolulu; lives and works between Los Angeles and New York) received an MFA from University of Southern California (2010) and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006). Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2019); Southard Reid, London (2018); Podium, Oslo (2018); Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires (2017); and Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2015). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Barbati Gallery, Venice (2023); Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2020); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2019); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson (2015); Swiss Institute, New York (2014); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Ferrer is a recipient of LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant (2015), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2013), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013).

Ferrer's work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA (MAC3).