FLORENCIA ESCUDERO
Canciones en la Colmena
October 8 - November 9

The gallery is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Brooklyn-based artist Florencia Escudero entitled Canciones en la Colmena (Songs Inside the Beehive).  This is the artist's second solo exhibition at the gallery and develops her ongoing research of the intersection of digital culture and the female body. 

Made with hard and soft materials, and unconventional approaches to printing, drawing, and casting, Escudero visualizes an intimate and futuristic imaginary in sculpture, where nature, technology, human, and animal are interdependent attributes.  The surfaces of Escudero's sculptures feature digital imagery and stock photography associated with a broad swath of economies related to women's bodies: fashion accessories, jewelry, hair styles, medical research, love dolls, and the phenomenon of e-girls and cam girls.   The largest sculpture in the exhibition is an upholstered butterfly pendant covered in a patchwork of hand-stitched satin and scaled up.  Its wings include manipulated computer-sourced imagery that Escudero splices into a sprawling amalgamation: multiple outward-gazing eyes extracted from a video game character, muscle tissue, the surface of a sofa, and outlines of flower petals.  Two separate sculptures in the shape of large mushrooms attach to the wall with metal hardware sculpted into sinuous tentacles.  They play sound pieces from speakers inserted into their fabric. The sound pieces are by Mexico-City based artist and writer Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola and are influenced by feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti's reflections on insects as 'slices of alternative living matter, which expresses the multiplicity of possible worlds and their copresence within our humanized universe.'  Resin outgrowths of human ears, noses, and mouths create a techno-futuristic vibe.

Escudero's research of various techniques in fabric dyeing, printing, and drawing find their way onto the surfaces of velvet, satin, spandex, false leather, ribbing, and mesh.  Entirely hand sewn, the artist dyes, silkscreens, and often draws onto her printed fabrics by hand, sometimes with plastic that creates a web-like coating.  She also uses different types of casts and molds to trap found matter such as shells, fossilized insects, handbag chains, false dread locks, and dried fruits into transparent coatings.  The cast elements appear as different stylized parts of the sculptures- as the handles of an urn, hair knots, and charms.  Escudero regularly experiments with different inventive techniques in separate projects with artists and friends.  She is also a co-founder of the independent publication Precog, which investigates themes of feminism, technology, cyber culture, and techno plastics in contemporary art.

Florencia Escudero was born in Singapore in 1987 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.She received a BFA in Fine Arts in 2010 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2012.Recent group exhibitions include Theorem x, Theorem y at Rachel Uffner and Mrs., 2021, Love Letter to a Nightmare, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY, 2020, and the Every Woman Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, New York, NY, 2019.Her work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail and Cultured Magazine and discussed in LatinX Spaces, Remezcla, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications.