¿Usted Que Come Que Adivina?
Lucia Hierro
¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina?
961 Chung King Road
JUNE 3 - JULY 15, 2023
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
Charlie James Gallery is delighted to present our second solo exhibition of works by New York-based artist Lucia Hierro titled ¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina?, opening June 3rd at the gallery from 6-9pm.
“I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings”
- Claes Oldenburg, “I Am For…” (1961)
“¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina?”: its closest English translation coming to “what are they feeding you that you see so well,” meant in earnest astonishment or mocking jest, dependent on delivery and context. “Adivina”: is not mere sight, but divination, a scrying, extra-sensory vision that, following the logic of the phrase, is granted to the seer by the food she eats. The conceit underlying “¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina?”: to eat is to know. In her exhibition of the same name, opening at Charlie James Gallery on June 3rd, Lucia Hierro unpacks this mythic entanglement of cuisine, knowledge, and consumption across a terrain of takeout orders and home kitchen accoutrements, charting in the process the role food plays in making and unmaking a sense of home.
If eating is knowing, then the works in ¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina? offer a conceptual bulwark to complete understanding- see “White Rice (Take-Out)”, as bare and impenetrable as a Ryman canvas; or “To Go Bag,” a floor-standing brown-bag pyramid that keeps viewers closed out of the promised food inside. These are not well-manicured beauty shots: takeout beans bubble, a pot sits soaking in soap water in “Cleaning”, and ingredients lie disassembled across “Orange Marmalade” – its final form tantalizingly unfinished. For Lucia, whose work has long mined the particularities of her Dominican identity and her home in Manhattan, this opacity is part of a continuing conceptual turn against a mainstream that flattens, consumes, then discards cultures as it sees fit, leaving histories and contexts crumpled like so many GrubHub receipts.
The scale of Lucia’s work plays a key part in reinforcing her newfound opacity. Her practice has long centered on making monuments to the domestic mundane- in turning foodstuffs and tchotchkes into massive tableaux in the vein of the great Pop prodigy Tom Wesselmann. In ¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina?, though, these everyday subjects are increasingly set free from their place in the picture plane, instead floating unmoored as oversized objects unto themselves. There is an intentional dearth of visual and situational context to works like the “Takeout” series or the massive pair of aprons which measure more than six feet tall each. These works connote specific contexts and yet remain intimidatingly, almost overwhelmingly impenetrable.
¿Usted Qué Come Que Adivina? is a celebration, yes, of food, flavor, and domestic labor; it is also a safeguard of the knowledge required of those things: “if you don’t know, you’ll never know”.
-Text by Justin Kamp
Lucia Hierro (b. 1987) 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) in San Francisco, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York), Latchkey Projects (New York), Charlie James Gallery, 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 (MCASD), El Museo del Barrio in New York City, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the JP Morgan & Chase Collection, the Progressive Art Collection and the Rennie collection in Vancouver, among others. In 2021, Lucia’s work was exhibited in ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo del Barrio’s (NY) first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from the US and Puerto Rico, and she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT 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.
Artist Instagram: @lucia_hierro_
Selected Works
Installation
