Carmen Argote Turns Cochineal’s Extractive History Into a Study of Embodiment

There is something deeply physical, almost primordial, that characterizes the work of Guadalajara-born, Los Angeles-based artist Carmen Argote. Materiality and sensoriality are at the heart of her practice, which is an exercise in navigating the physical and emotional interplay that accompanies our relationship with the world. In her soon-to-close show at Silverlens in New York, “Soft Perimeter,” her gradients of red pigments are as vibrant in their tactility as they are visceral in their tonal depths—the body, re-embodied. Argote derives the color from cochineal, a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha from which the natural dye carmine has traditionally been produced. One of the oldest pigments used in the Americas, dating back as early as the second century B.C., its vibrant hue was symbolic of the gods, the sun and blood. The Maya and Aztecs and Indigenous groups in Oaxaca and Tlaxcala used the insects, known in Nahuatl as nocheztli, to paint murals, color sacred codices and dye textiles. When the Spanish arrived, they established an extractive and highly lucrative trade, shipping tons of dried insects across the Atlantic to color European royal garments and paintings. For Argote, it is a material that embodies both human and natural histories of extraction, as well as their entanglements.

Everything in the show speaks to transformation and the alchemical processes through which matter transitions between states. Argote’s engagement with cochineal came after experimenting with onions and other natural dyes, she tells Observer. While developing “As Above, So Below,” her 2020 exhibition at the New Museum, she was working with citrus, citric acid and fruit trees, thinking about how one substance can transform another in nature. Cochineal entered naturally into that inquiry: “I was very interested in how one thing could have an impact on another. That is how I came to cochineal. I loved its vibrancy and that orange color.”

Its connection to the body and to sensation, however, only emerged when she started to bring it to a more monumental scale, with a site-specific installation, Me at Market, first presented at the Visual Arts Center around 2019. There, a monumental textile piece suspended from above was punctuated by a series of cochineal dye pours, into which Argote dropped lemon juice. The process produced rectilinear marks that cascaded down the surface like a waterfall, eventually landing and collecting in a natural pool inside pockets sewn into the material and across the painting on the floor. “The work involved the relationship between the vertical and the horizontal, the action of pouring and the line produced through gravity, as well as the shifts and changes that occurred,” she explains. “It was about alchemy.”

A section of that work is in the Silverlens show; its title came from a “meat market” sign she encountered while walking, an activity that has long been central to her artistic practice, Argote recounts. The phrase had prompted questions about who or what is “at market”: the artist, the artwork or both. After the original installation, she decided to cut the paper into sections like “cuts of meat,” allowing the work to continue beyond its site-specific form and eventually enter the art market.

Through repeated handling and layering, the cochineal accumulated into a thick, geological, rock-like sedimentation on the linen surface. That geological temporality opened onto a bodily one, according to the artist: “In our bodies, experiences can also harden us or build up. That began connecting the work back to the body. The alchemical processes of lemon and cochineal become metaphors for different bodily sensations.”

The vibrant red in her pieces in New York is often traversed by orange, purple, hematoma-like areas and brownish, earthy tones, as though the surfaces were bruised, rooting, molding or simply evolving. It is no coincidence that the titles of the textile assemblages, Yes firebasket, Nuclear blossom, Pause of Flame and the larger Warm summons, Matchstick and Please fireweed, as well as the monumental work on paper where is the match that sparkled the entire terrain, connect them to fire’s destructiveness but also its transformational, catastrophic and potentially regenerative power.

In her newer works, Argote uses cochineal to think simultaneously about hardening and softening, as seen in the more corporeal wall sculptures made from bundled and knotted organic and found materials. Resembling cocoons or mummies, they evoke the body not as a stable entity but as something subject to inescapable, continuous transformations, both internal and external. She 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.”

This becomes even more powerful in monumental works on paper such as where is the match that sparkled the entire terrain and a similar earlier work she showed at the Hammer Museum. While making them, Argote recounts, she was taken aback by the sensory experience. “I thought, ‘These insect bodies are really resonating.’” The sheets in her studio looked like a fiery landscape, and she “could feel how the insect bodies were telling me something about sensations in the interior of my own body, while also connecting those sensations to landscape. I began thinking about what it would mean to show these large works in a gallery and allow the resonance of the materiality to express itself. I wanted the material to speak and the insect bodies, their transformations and their resonance to continue.”

In these works, Argote invites the viewer to experience a similar reorientation around the soft perimeters of our experiential field—an exercise in the re-embodiment of sensation through which we can understand how bodies, memories and systems of power become embedded in physical space. “With the linen works and the soft perimeter, softness is also architecture. I think about the spaces that contain us and house us,” she explains. We’re also invited to embrace the essential porosity of those perimeters. She asks us to move through the world as filtering membranes in continuous dialogue with a broader, entangled system, rather than as singular and secluded monads, despite the illusion of individual ego constructed over the course of Western civilization. “I think it is more than the perimeter is malleable. With the soft sculpture, I realized it was architecture. It could trace the shape of a space or take on a new shape. It could become a soft form that makes other possibilities permissible.”

Argote has created her own ecosystem, both in her studio and in each of her exhibitions. A padded, snake-like textile sculpture at the entrance, Soft perimeter of home (2026), maps a domestic interior and the entangled relationships unfolding within the hybrid home and studio that she shares with her mother, who often collaborates with her on the linen-based works, and a handful of chickens, which also serve as collaborators. Notably, she describes her own relationship with the work as collaborative. “I have often wondered whether I think of art as an external entity. That is possible,” she reflects. “I also think of it as a collective attunement, like a radio frequency we can tune into. Or it might be an aspect of myself that is recognized and can be integrated when I make the work. It may be both.”

She accepts the description of this practice as a form of channeling: “My body may be channeling a way of knowing, and I do think it is ancestral. It definitely moves through the women in my family, through our hands.” Argote, her mother and her grandmother are all named Carmen, and she sees a lineage of making moving through their hands.

In her world, materials possess their own forms of wisdom and expression. Cochineal and linen are not passive substances but agents that shape the work’s development. Their behavior can redirect the artist, produce knowledge and reveal possibilities that were not present in the initial plan. Art-making is a conversation with something partly unknown: a frequency, a material intelligence or an unrecognized part of the self. “I really believe that art knows more. Through the conversation, the art continues to teach me what it is. I am often surprised by its agency, and I allow that agency to come forward,” she says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Argote has recently felt a growing desire to move toward embodied action and performance, and she developed a two-act performance for the New York show. The exhibition’s opening action involved Argote speaking directly to the works. She began with the phrase “This work said no,” asserting the agency of the objects, then moved from piece to piece in conversation with them. For the closing performance, she said she intended to become more embodied and interact more physically with the works. “I am thinking about what it means to do a performance in the context of a commercial gallery. How do we open and close a show? How does the work move from stillness while it is being viewed back into circulation?”

This will not replace making, which she understands as a private action and an intimate conversation among her hands, her body and the material. Performance and object-making remain complementary, but Argote now thinks of the act of making itself as a performance, with the resulting artwork functioning as documentation of that action and as a vessel for its energy or charge. The encounter with a viewer can activate that charge again, turning the work into a site of new potential and further performative acts. Her forthcoming residencies at High Desert Test Sites and Art Farm in the Bay Area will support this turn toward performance, and she identifies this broader movement toward embodied conversation with objects, materials and space as the direction in which her work is currently leading. “I am very interested in tapping into the frequency I mentioned, allowing the artwork to teach me and being in conversation with it. Performance feels like a desire that is coming forward,” she says.

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