The Brooklyn Rail

The fifteen fabric sculptures on view in Phygitalia demonstrate that Florencia Escudero is an exceptional artist, capable of aligning diverse materials with her rigorous conceptual aims so skillfully that sometimes it is difficult to separate the two. We see resin appliqués atop digitally-printed spandex, or a heart-shaped two-way mirror held within a foam support by cast-snakeskin in blue. We find images of stars, butterflies, outlet covers, and heavily made-up eyes; there are also “real” (though sometimes faux) shells, necklaces, snake skeletons, and much more. The iconography and materiality of Escudero’s maximalist juxtapositions confront us with the complex ways that our desires for beauty and interpersonal connection are simultaneously routed, with ever-increasing interconnection, through the digital and real-world spheres. The show is split across two venues—Rachel Uffner on the Lower East Side and Kristen Lorello (who represents Escudero) on the Upper East Side—and its title plays on the neologism phygital, referring to the blend of the physical and the digital, and talia, from the latter half of the word genitalia. These are penetrating works, and more impressive than their apt alignment of form with message is the vast intellectual terrain they traverse, from ancient pots to yesterday’s viral trend. These sculptures, at once pillowy and flayed, hold a mirror to human behavior, the systems that support it, and its convergence with the machines we have created in our own image.

Escudero blurs the physical and the digital on the surfaces of her works from the very start. The blue and white Rococo patterning of Hypnohotel (2024), for example, contains geometric cut-out images of body parts which at first appear collaged onto the fabric. But they are actually part of a scene the artist staged and recorded with digital photography, and then silkscreened onto the spandex that forms the work’s outer envelope. Hence Hypnohotel’s fragmented body ricochets between analog and digital incarnations, only to be contained, like a possession, by a chain that wraps around the sculpture and attaches it to the wall. Here Escudero cuts right to the heart of humankind’s desire for domination through hierarchies of power. This theme is addressed yet more directly by History of the Polka Dot (2022), a basket of iridescent bananas that looks like a futuristic version of Josephine Baker’s banana skirt—certainly a self-conscious reference to histories of colonialism writ large. Indeed, much of Escudero’s imagery derives from another site of transactional interaction: a love hotel in New Jersey whose thematic interiors (camouflage, princess, peacock, valentines) Escudero photographs, as above, yielding the Rococo bedspread and jacuzzi on-off switch of Hypnohotel.

There’s a smart irreverence to Escudero’s process, as she flouts the conventional uses of materials and searches, we sense tirelessly, for unusual materials or methods of making to fuel her creativity. In such human-height vessels as Glitch Vase (2024) and Poison Pond (2023), the artist applied translucent flowers and hearts cast from bed coverings straight onto the fabric, before they are cured. At the crux of this DIY approach is a thorough interrogation of accepted norms, one as applicable to the details of studio practice as it is to humanity’s rapidly-proliferating interactions with machines. Why not use a tool or a technology differently? Why not seek beauty advice, the comfort of routine, or the dopamine hits previously derived from interactions IRL from AI-generated bots? The hearts and stars adorning Escudero’s works seem to take on the significance not just of a single circumstance (the meaning carried by an emoji sent in a text, say), but of the great shift of affect into the digital realm.

And yet Escudero reminds us that shape-shifting, communing with incorporeal beings, and relegating the threat of otherness to spaces of enclosure are hardly inventions of our digital present. Such practices date back as far as culture itself, and have always subtended broader biases against women. As Anne Carson writes in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” “woman is that creature who puts the inside on the outside.” This is the threat of the leaky vessel—a threat to the desire of patriarchal culture to contain a woman’s unruly thoughts and desires. And the leaky vessel par excellence comes in the form of the ancient amphora, which Escudero here splits straight down the middle, so we have access to its backside, which is also its inside. (Two of the four are mounted to the wall; we can peek or walk behind the two that are freestanding.) Behind Diamond Swim (2024), a peachy-pink vase adorned with silkscreened samples of skin-toned makeup, we find cobalt blue knees, feet, and a face that all emerge from the sculpture’s core, as if the rest of a body is submerged within it. This is a 3D printout of a puppet that doesn’t have its own personality or language, and requires direction from another party—here Escudero alludes to a subculture of sex dolls, fetishized prosthetics, or cell phone games that invite users to clean a female character or give her a makeover before sending her off to various destinations. Facing Diamond Swim, the still-pervasive cultural compulsion to instruct female behavior is palpable.

Phygitalia’s show-stopper is a five-piece sculpture that spans the full length of Uffner’s gallery and evokes splayed legs or a snake, chopped into five pieces. Raised to waist height on custom steel stands, the pieces sit far enough apart for visitors to pass between them, underscoring the fact that their cohesion is psychic, not physical. Its title, Daphne (2024), alludes to the famous myth wherein a nymph transforms into a laurel tree to evade violation by Apollo. Daphne foiled her pursuer, but was nevertheless sapped of her power. What is lost and what is gained as bodies, subjects, and the desires that attach to them oscillate between realms? Although the transmutations that attend our ever-more intimate fusion of the digital and the physical may not be as immediately dramatic as Daphne’s, Escudero warns, their consequences remain similarly unknown, a blade just as likely to cut both ways.