Commonwealth and Council presents Holding, Carmen Argote’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. With renewed interest in the possibilities of play as a freeing act, Argote spent many months working in fitful experimentation from her home studio. Perceived bouts of failure begot new tactics of play: she destroyed dozens of works, hammering some to pieces, painting over rigorously developed canvases, even forcibly throwing what she deemed a completed work over a fence. Argote’s adoption of wildness into what she previously termed the “playspace” of art making led her back to her foundational preoccupations with material experimentation, bodily movement and constraint, and generative destruction/reconstruction. Into this iteration of the playspace, Argote invites the concept of “holding,” a term that resonates with the artist’s healing practices: holding the self, holding space, and being held. As often quipped in psychoanalysis, the call to “look under the hood,” asks us to hold the self, hold space, and be held not merely for the sake of gaining equanimity, but for revelatory experience. The art, for Argote, potentiates movement in the playspace, envelopment around scarred surfaces, and contact between selves and others. Yet what we might wish to hold also falls apart: the body sitting or crouching on the canvas is seen only in its negative space; the artist/self is present everywhere in these works while also fragmented and disarticulated. Patterned from the artist’s hallmark jumpsuit and sewn by her mother in an ongoing familial collaboration, Skin ego carries bronze figurines, each of which holds a yoga pose, in its pockets. Made from organza-like material, both sturdy and diaphanous, the jumpsuit alludes to the body as a projection of the self onto the art object. Echoing the resting bronzes pouched in the jumpsuit, the yoga poses affixed to the masks, illegible as such, resemble instead unmoveable growths occluding the skin, mouth, eyes, nose, and ears of the artist’s face. Cast from the artist’s legs in a seated lotus pose, Crustaceous Supports centers the grounded body as emptied shells, a sloughed off vestige of meditation as creative act. Starting from the same crossed legged shape, Holding: the muscular skin and Holding: to make a chair contort the pose to near indecipherability, where knee becomes elbow, leg becomes arm, and the body is lost in its elevation from ground to pedestal, reaching toward the metaphysical. In the works on canvas, Argote’s unidirectional squat in Sensual transferrings and Stimulated markings, and her pelvic grip on the floor in Seated breath, Seated abrasions, and Seated scrape uncover negative space and limit the reach of her facility for mark-making to compulsive repetitions of fingertips, searching hands around the base, stroking swaths of the forearm, and cringed scrapes of fingernails. Searching beyond these constraints, in Pigeon, the artist’s hands appear more fluid around her body. Resembling the pigmented handprints of the ancient rock art at the Cueva de las Manos, the artist’s body traces the primal resonance of hands, skin, movement, and time. —Mary McGuire Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA and BFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2007, 2004). Solo exhibitions have been held at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2022); Primary, Nottingham (2021); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2020); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2020, 2018); New Museum, New York (2019); and PAOS, Guadalajara (2019). Selected group exhibitions have been held at El Museo del Barrio, New York (2024); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); SculptureCenter, Queens (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and Ballroom Marfa (2017). Argote is a recipient of Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2019), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013). Argote’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Art Foundation; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach. ____ Our language betrays our bondage to "the visual"—we use terms like "insight" and "vision" as metaphors for knowledge itself. Cultural institutions casually designate museum artworks as "visual art," privileging seeing over other senses. Even our most sophisticated sciences translate invisible phenomena from the electromagnetic spectrum into spectacular renderings of nebulae and viruses, perpetuating our compulsion to make the invisible visible through quasi-photographic representations. In Emilija Škarnulytė's film installation, Aldona, we encounter a day in the life of the artist's grandmother, Aldona. Since losing her vision in 1986, the year Chernobyl's radioactive poison scattered across Europe, Aldona has developed a different set of eyes—one that lives in her fingertips and flows across her limbs. Paradoxically, Škarnulytė presents us, the film's viewers, with an alternative to visual privilege by suggesting how Aldona uses alternative means of sensing beyond sight's dominion. Watch as Aldona moves through Lithuania's Grūtas Park, an open-air tourist attraction populated by expropriated relics of Soviet power. Watch as Aldona's hands read the cold, fallen Soviet monuments like a priestess interpreting arcane runes. Watch as Aldona, who outlived her oppressors, finds solace in everyday rituals: washing cheese, organizing cutlery, and gathering apple peelings to compost and renew the cycle of life. Like healers who diagnose by touch, Aldona guides us through latent legacies of power. Her confident, precise movements through contested space suggest that what we consider her "blindness" is also an enhancement in perception—perhaps recalling the myth of an ancient seer who peers through time, using extraordinary vision to divine warnings about the future. Returning to the paradox of watching a film to reconsider the dominance of sight, Aldona also challenges its audience to read our surroundings through other sensory means. In previous installations, medicinal herbs from Aldona's village of Gerdašiai hang above the screen. These herbs were gathered in a place now caught between NATO forces and their adversaries, where surveillance cameras stand sentinel among native, healing plants. Replacing the digital eyes that sweep the borderlands today, Aldona scans the landscape through her hands and cultivates its produce, finding memory and inheritance in the stones and the soil. Might we apply this perspective to other conflicted territories, such as the deserts and coasts of California, where residents often fail to see their homes as a "hot zone" in an ongoing story of colonization and climate destruction? Such an allusion seems purposefully encoded at Commonwealth and Council. In the gallery space, local plants that have survived the drought frame Škarnulytė's screen as wafting botanical scents fill the air visitors breathe into their bodies before encountering any images. Although Aldona debuted over a decade ago, its influence resonates throughout Škarnulytė's body of work. Since Aldona, the artist has frequently employed extra-human devices—radio telescopes, sonar, and other remote sensing technologies—to make imperceptible natural phenomena accessible to human understanding. And while Aldona might reinforce misconceptions on how one sense may compensate for another that is lost, the reality is more complex: the human brain's plasticity enables adaptation, but these adjustments only become meaningful through dedicated practice. Through Aldona and her subsequent artworks, Škarnulytė invites us to question our reliance on the visual, exploring how alternative modes of perception might reveal a hidden, more holistic "image" of our world—if only we take the time to pay attention, listen, and learn. —Adam Kleinman Working between documentary and speculative fiction, Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987, Vilnius, Lithuania)’s films and immersive installations take viewers through decommissioned nuclear power plants, deep-sea data storage units, forgotten underwater cities, and uncanny natural phenomena. Škarnulytė received an MA from University of Tromsø (2013) and a BA from Brera Academy, Milan (2010). Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Kunsthalle Trondheim (2024); Canal Projects, New York (2024); Centre Artistique et Culturel, Sion (2023); Tate Modern, London (2021); Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel (2021); National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (2021); and PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2020). Selected group exhibitions have been held at The Brick, Los Angeles (2024); Palais de Tokyo (2024); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2024); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2024); Villa Medici, Rome (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan (2023); Helsinki Biennial (2023); 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); Bergen Kunsthall (2022); and Beijing Media Art Biennale (2021). Škarnulytė is a recipient of Ars Fennica Award (2023) and Future Generation Art Prize (2019). Škarnulytė has participated in residencies at Providenza, Corsica (2022); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2021); The Bogliasco Foundation (2021); Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2019); and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta (2018). Škarnulytė’s work is in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kadist Art Foundation; and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.