Soft Perimeter of Home

Silverlens is pleased to present Carmen Argote: Soft Perimeter of Home, the artist's first solo exhibition in New York and with the gallery. The works in Argote’s exhibition are unified by her use of cochineal, a deep red dye harvested from insects, whose usage dates back to the Mayans and Aztecs. When mixed with lemon juice, the dye shifts to vibrant orange, scarlet, gray, and violet, a viscerally intense palette with associations of sun, blood, passion, and death. Argote references fire, a force of nature both destructive and sanctifying. Her sculptures suggest chemical transformation, nodding to the 2025 wildfires that forever changed the landscape of Los Angeles, where she has lived since moving from Guadalajara at age five. Their compacted and enclosed forms will be the containment of a force that resists it. Cochineal, itself derived from a non-human body, constitutes the corporeal throughline of “Soft perimeter of home.” Argote imagines the dye as “almost like a body,” behaving similarly to “all kinds of secretions, like hormones and different chemicals, which shift and change our mood.” Argote’s linen works—cut and sewn by her mother, her frequent collaborator—suggest holding, harboring, and keeping; but sometimes what is meant to be carried cannot be contained, instead seeping outward, inward, and through, changing everything in its path. —Andrea Gyorody

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