Commonwealth and Council presents Carmen Argote's The Artist, having used all her money to make the work, lives in the mother-mold of her sculpture.–an exhibition which builds directly upon the remains of her contribution to Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum, Filtration System for a Process Based Practice. Walking around Eastlake in Lincoln Park, Argote noticed a small concrete island. She imagined herself standing on it and looking out onto the park, already a sort of island in the city. The island turned out to be a cover, concealing the lake's filtration system. This shifting perspective led Argote to reconstruct the “island” to scale in the confines of her studio, where it became a sculptural work space offering her a new vantage point. Rather than suppress the circumstances of art making, Argote builds artworks animated by the conditions impacting her practice–including economic hardship. Yet just being an artist entails a privileged position. What does it mean to have no money, yet still have the freedom to own one's time, to have that walk in the park, and to participate in the creative economy? And what of the artist’s life? This island shelters and sustains what the art world does not–life itself, with its crucial nexus of practice. For Argote, the mound served as a direct platform for making art: work space and material support in one. Using the top of the mound as studio, she painted 8 foot diameter cut muslin circles in a range of solid colors–allowing excess paint to drip onto the form, documenting the repetitive action and marking the form's contour. All of these surfaces, the circles and the mound itself, became the artwork presented at the Hammer.