Carmen Argote
Last Light
Last Light by Carmen Argote is a video essay filmed in the weeks immediately following the government mandated stay-at-home order during the 2020 pandemic. At a time during which Los Angeles was unusually devoid of cars and activity, Argote narrates a series of walks through the city, while telling a story of loss, of a relationship, of distance, of abandonment. A mix of still and moving images, Argote describes what she sees and hears moving through the city; noting each car and birdsong which would otherwise be overwhelmed by the noise of the city. During the early days of the pandemic, touching was complicated, but Argote wants to touch the city, as a poetic gesture, in this video. In other poetic evocations, zones of destruction become metaphors for a reality in ruins, boarded-up houses for a closed world, a dog spinning in circles a metaphor for being stuck at home. Near the end of the video, Argote returns to her personal experience of abandonment in the hospital while she was seriously ill and almost didn’t survive. The global experience of the pandemic, as an individual and collective trauma, is poetically and personally addressed through this film essay. Argote’s vivid account transports viewers back into the mental state of 2020, to that sense of the invisible unknown that might kill us or people we love. It was grave, boring, scary, and confusing and the health care crisis was just a piece of the larger story of that dramatic and turbulent year. This film is a kind of eulogy to a social moment, an attempt to come to terms with a transformative rupture.
Carmen Argote’s practice is one of specific places. USing site-specific sculpture, installation, drawings, video and performance, Argote works through the act of inhabiting a space. Her practice is in conversation with the site she is working from, often pointing to the body, to class, and to economic structures in relationship to architecture and to personal history. Using physical sites, such as apartment layouts or amusement parks, the artist engages with the construction of memory. Through foraging, salvaging, and spatial research, new projects and narratives emerge, often explored through her own body. her choice of materials—cochineal, citrus fruit, avocados, strawberry syrup, and coffee—directly reference histories of labor, violence, oppression, and colonialism through the visual language of abstraction.