Objects of Desire
Naranjo 141 gallery and residency, Mexico City
by Ben Adams-Keane, November 27, 2024
The Naranjo 141 gallery and residency is not a place you’ll just happen upon if you’re wandering around Roma and Condesa. Founders Ashley Noyes and Bryce Smith did not go for a typical austere, white-walled gallery space, but instead landed on a townhouse in Santa María, a colony an hours-walk north of Avenida Álvaro Obregón that’s home to many more artist’s studios than galleries. The off-the-beaten path journey to visit the space is a fitting prelude to their latest show, Objects of Desire, which brings together eleven female artists from the Americas, Europe and Asia whose work contends with the distances that our desires compel us to cover.
Only a few of the artists in the show actually depict objects. Rather than preoccupy itself with materiality, as the title might seem to suggest, or with the connotations of desire, as a more clumsily conceived show might ask of an all-female cast, Objects of Desire seems to be concerned with something much more elusive: The fleeting moments we perceive to be more material, more permanent, more calcified than any physical object. Scenes of sincerity, glimpses of the natural world under light, and performative figures are rendered with varying tenderness, banality and wit, offering a survey of the experiences, feelings, and sights that captivate without succumbing to any prescriptive definition of what an object of desire must be. Here, an object is whatever holds the artist’s attention, and desire is the ephemeral force binding the two of them together.
The first room of the gallery features three works: One bronze sculpture by Lea Mugnaini, titled Amalgamarsi that presents two anthropomorphized forms joined together, a cyanotype by Diana Sinclair that depicts two lovers separated into a diptych, and a small oil on canvas by Zahra Mansoor. The works by Mugnaini and Sinclair usher the viewer to the sense of yearning that reoccurs throughout the show, but it’s a small piece in the third room that serves as the best point of entry into the show’s more intangible focus: Plucked from a skyward-view of the carousel in Chapultepec park, twenty minutes west of Naranjo 141, Rachel Marisa LaBine’s Night Orbit captures the carousel’s flourishing wrought iron facade transformed by rows of florescent bulbs and whirring movement. LaBine leaves the viewer just enough hints of her subject to grasp the thing underneath it all, without allowing her reference to overtake the true object of her fascination: The way that light can transform a place, the way a sidelong glance can etch itself onto our memory.
Diana Sinclair, Let Not Man Put Us Under, 2024, Cyanotype on fabric mounted to canvas, in 2 parts, each 46 x 23 inches
Rachel Marisa LaBine, Night orbit, 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 11 x 15 3/4 inches
Eileen Feng, Nevermind, 2024, Oil on linen, 12 x 10 inches
Lea Mugnaini, Amalgamarsi, 2024,Incised with the artist’s signature on the base and stamped Fundicíon Artística Campanas Sonoras CDMX on the underside of the base, Patinated bronze, with patinated brass base, Sculpture: 12 x 6 1/2 x 1 3/4 in.Base: 1/8 x 11 1/2 x 8 1/4 in.
Ed. 1 of 3
Sofia Lucarelli, Hidden Catch, 2024, Oil on linen, 17 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches
Danielle De Jesus, Dancers in Elmhurst, 2024, Acrylic on U.S. currency, 7 3/4 x 12 3/8 in.
The show’s second room features an energetic abstract canvas by British artist Georgina Stone on its northern most wall, a whimsical ceramic ‘thank you’ bag and Venus-de-Willendorf inspired figure fired in the raku technique by Asian-American artist Taylor Lee in the center, and a pair of small crystal-glass paintings by Sofia Lucarelli on the western-most wall. Between the north and southern walls of the second and third rooms, a fascinating conversation about textiles takes place. Two small canvases by Pakistani artist Zahra Mansoor show lone women looking up longingly at a moon that partially conceals a gauzy photo-transfer of a woman’s blouse being unbuttoned. Behind each canvas, a piece of muslin is fixed in a loose, sculptural form, casting scenes of domestic life of woman in Pakistan against the alluring quality of a material native to Karachi. Meanwhile, Eileen Feng magnifies a torn edge of peeling wallpaper, carefully cataloging the remnants— the frayed threads, wisps of vinyl, and textures rubbed-smooth— that can become fixtures to an eye roaming the home. From thousands of miles apart, in contexts monumental and minute, the two artists show how textiles can entrance us.
The main gallery features a spread of small works by five of the eleven artists. Caroline Zhang and Eileen Feng’s clinically executed canvases form a potent foil to Danielle De Jesus’ scenes of resilient joy. Here, photographs of Puerto Rican life in Bushwick are painted onto a ground of uncut dollar bills, boldly articulating the difference between the desire to preserve culture, and the kind of capitalistic desire that seeks to mediate life along monetary lines. But it’s a small canvas in the northeast corner of the room that might be the best expression of the show’s central conceit: In subtly textured tiles of green and blue, Sofia Lucarelli ghosts the silhouette of a horse so lightly that at first glance it goes unnoticed in Hidden Catch. The potency of the mirage rests not in the muscular subject but in the fact that its barely there, on the verge of disappearing into the clearly defined tile, where its imminent absence is impressed onto the viewer more palpably than anything we might touch.
OBJECTS OF DESIRE, November 16, 2024 - January 12, 2025
Eileen Feng, Danielle De Jesus, Rachel Marisa LaBine, Taylor Lee, Sofia Lucarelli, Lizzy Lunday, Zahra Mansoor, Lea Mugnaini, Diana Sinclair, Georgina Stone, Caroline Zhang
Photography by Nicolás Sierra, all images are courtesy of the gallery