Lucia Hierro: CorotoS y Ajuares

Esker Foundation
January 20 - April 28

Corotos y Ajuares roughly translates to “odds and ends.” Corotos is a Spanish colloquialism for household objects – akin to how one might refer to everyday items in English as “stuff” or “things.” Lucia Hierro uses the visual language of consumption to dissect our complex relationships to these odds and ends. Working across textile, sculpture, and installation, Hierro points to the capacity of objects to serve as vectors for cultural knowledge, or reflections of self-image, and simultaneously, the ways in which our habits of consumption render us complicit in unsustainable, inequitable economies of production, consumption, and waste.

Corotos y Ajuares brings together a series of soft sculptures and a site-specific mural that collectively focus on household items and consumer goods, like disposable takeout containers, a paper menu, and a pair of aprons. Many of these items reflect Hierro’s specific experiences as an artist within the Dominican diaspora in Manhattan and the Bronx. In the same breath, they speak broadly to the coalescence of community around objects or food, and to our collective participation in a consumer culture that ravenously appropriates and discards culturally specific objects and practices.

Process, material, and scale are key to Hierro’s practice. Her sculptural works often begin with photographic images printed on fabrics such as cotton sateen or suede, which are then stitched together and filled with hard-celled foam. Close inspection reveals traces of Hierro’s process: seams and hand-stitches are deliberately left visible, signifying the artist’s participation in intersecting economies, and honouring a familial history of sewing and textile work.

In a gesture that references histories of advertising and Pop Art, Hierro’s work renders seemingly unremarkable things in oversized scale. The totemic scale of these items – of Dyckman Express’ grease-stained paper bag and receipt, for instance – begs us to consider the vast amount of labour, capital, and resources contained within these disposable materials.

Read altogether, the exhibition’s iconography teases out the networks of production and labour on which we all rely. A collection of aluminum and plastic takeout containers filled with rice, chicken, and beans points simultaneously to agricultural labour and supply chains, grocery vendors, line cooks, gig-economy delivery drivers, and the food delivery apps that atomize and mediate the final portion of these transactions, insulating customers from everything that came before. In this sense, Corotos y Ajuares carries with it the ways in which odds and ends acquire meaning through their passage across space and time, and the widespread reverberations of our habits of consumption.

BIOGRAPHY
Lucia Hierro is a Dominican American conceptual artist born and raised in New York City, Washington Heights/Inwood, and currently based in the South Bronx. Lucia’s practice, which includes sculpture, digital media and installation, confronts twenty-first century capitalism through an intersectional lens. She received a BFA from SUNY Purchase (2010) and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2013). Hierro’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Latchkey Projects, New York; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles; Primary Projects, Miami; Sean Horton Presents, Dallas; and Casa Quien in the Dominican Republic.

Her works reside in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; El Museo del Barrio, New York City; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; the JP Morgan & Chase Collection; the Progressive Art Collection and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; among others. In 2021, Lucia’s work was exhibited in ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio’s first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from the US and Puerto Rico/ She was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield titled Marginal Costs. Lucia had a solo show at Fabienne Levy Gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland in December 2022. Lucia is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

Open: Wed - Fri: 11:00 - 18:00, Sat & Sun: 12:00 - 17:00
Access: Location is wheelchair accessible. Exhibition is child friendly.
For more information see eskerfoundation.com

Esker Foundation, 4th floor, 1011 9th Ave SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0H7