Action still: Manéjese con Cuidado (Handle with Love/Care), PAOS, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2019
Carmen Argote
California, USA
Visual
Artist in Residence
↗ www.alexstrada.com
Artist Statement
My art-making begins with the process of searching, digesting, and engaging in conversation with the spaces I inhabit. I think of my body akin to a sponge, absorbing and processing my surroundings through a corporeal lens. This process deepens my understanding of the relationships between personal history, memory, cultural systems, and the collective energy of society. I manifest these connections through site-specific sculpture, installation, drawings, video, and performance. My choice of materials—cochineal, citrus fruit, avocados, and coffee—reference histories of labor, violence, oppression, and colonialism through the visual language of abstraction.Walking plays a central role in my practice, serving as a method for constructing and developing the visual language of my work. The slowness of walking offers a way to navigate scale, confronting ideas of class, consumption, home, and place. I document my observations through photographs and voice memos, capturing fragments and gestures that inform my artistic process.
While at Headlands
While at Headlands I will deepen my practice by engaging with the landscape, architecture, and community at Headlands. I am drawn to the relationships that develop between residents and the cross-disciplinary conversations that emerge through shared creative processes. Fellow artists have described this residency as transformative, and I believe it will offer me the space to reconnect with my walking ritual—an essential part of my art-making. Over the past three years, my work has examined an inner foraging of self, honoring my psyche and inner child. Following a solo show, I entered a period of entropy, later reemerging through the action of play. I have been incubating a new body of works that examine the relationship between private and public spaces and privilege process over outcome. At Headlands, I seek to deconstruct familiar patterns, reintroduce movement into my practice, and investigate the poetic potential of surprise through material and gesture.
