DIANA SOFIA LOZANO
Suspended in the Iris
presented by ACOMPI
June 5 - July 5, 2021
291 Grand Street New York
ACOMPI is thrilled to present Suspended in the Iris, a site-specific installation by artist Diana Sofia Lozano. Lozano braids steel, wool, and clay into an undefinable botanical chimera that eludes clarity and recognition. Located in the street-level window display of Home Gallery, her installation invites passersby to question their impulses to dissect, classify, and exoticize the spectacle, in order to interrogate a Western desire to dominate our surroundings as a way to make sense of the world around us.
Suspended in the Iris wields mirrors to not only capture the dynamism of its surrounding urban ecology, but also to flip the gaze back onto the viewer captured within its fragmented reflections. Lured by the installation’s floral epicenter, passersby catch themselves reflected in its habitat as they become a spectacle absorbed into the language of Lozano’s objects, creating an interspecies perspective that decenters our own while blurring the boundaries of viewership. Further inspection of the mirrors reveals the reflection of an otherwise secret photograph in a moment of clandestine intimacy. By disrupting mechanics of vision, Lozano deprioritizes visuality as empirical and objective information in order to present a more haptic and embodied mode of relationality.
“The development of botany–as the methodical examination, documentation, and classification of vegetal matter–abetted imperial expansion, colonial extraction, and subsequent subjugation of racialized peoples,” says Lozano. “Plants’ mercurial and ambiguous position within a hierarchy of animacy renders this lens of interrogation lush with interpretations in-between subjectivities. The aesthetics of hybridity, fantasy, and ornamentation thus illuminate the transgressive potential of that which is unclassifiable: that which moves fluidly through diverse microclimates, as well as that considered to be ‘invasive’ or ‘monstrous’ botanical anomalies.”
By connecting the exoticization and classification of plants to systems of gender, sexuality, and race, Lozano accounts for how taxonomy fails to communicate the complexities and interconnectivities of the world in which we live. As a storefront window in the Lower East Side, the botanical installation does not aim to juxtapose the bifurcation of “city” and “nature”; rather, it destabilizes the “naturalization” of species and spectatorship. Its entanglement of self and other ruptures the illusion of a sovereign individual subject come to capture, classify, and exotify the “other.” Through the use of magnification–of subject, viewer, and phenomena– Lozano creates a participatory moment of suspension that invites us to assess, and uproot, our impulses and challenges our expectations.
Alongside the exhibition, ACOMPI will publish a limited-edition, signed and numbered risograph print by Diana Sofia Lozano available exclusively through their website.
ABOUT DIANA SOFIA LOZANO
Diana Sofia Lozano (b.1992, Cali, Colombia) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work uses the language of botanical hybrids; the naturally occurring, genetically modified, and the imagined. Lozano presents biomimicry as metaphors for identity construction at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. She is interested in the deconstruction of botanical taxonomic failures in order to reveal and redefine the boundaries of colonial identificatory practices and geopolitical borders. Lozano has exhibited at Company Gallery, Wave Hill Gardens, Deli Gallery and Fisher Parrish Gallery in NYC, Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, New Image Art in Los Angeles, Casa Prado in Barranquilla Colombia, and Capsule Gallery in Shanghai China, among others. Lozano received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2013 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2021. @_lloraras_
ABOUT ACOMPI
Founded by Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, ACOMPI is a global curatorial collective based in New York City. With a penchant for new commissions, ACOMPI serves as a community-ingrained platform to highlight and expand the intersection of art, commerce, and the built environment. ACOMPI celebrates narratives of immigrants, youths, and artists working in interdisciplinary means not satiated or supported by the current market. ACOMPI recently organized the colloquium “What Can NYC Art Museums Do For Immigrants?” at NYU Steinhardt and curated Shanzhai Lyric: Canal Street Research Association . Their projects have been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. @acompi.nyc
PRESS CONTACTS
ACOMPI
Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley
info@acompi.nyc
Diana Sofia Lozano
dianalozano92@gmail.com