When I visited Tanya Aguiñiga during the installation of her latest show this week, she told me that she had recently spent her days envisioning the tall portal at Albertz Benda as a birth canal. She has treated the gallery like one big femme body, setting spills of knitted wool over that entryway and allowing their droops to stand in for the pubic hairs surrounding a vagina. Presiding over the delivery taking place is a septet of gorgeous sculptural works that Aguiñiga has dubbed the “Seven Sisters.” Each has knots of cotton rope and hair-like tufts of flax, and each represents an aunt that raised the artist during a childhood lived along the US-Mexico border.
In more senses than one, the focus here is labor. Aguiñiga and the members of her studios have dyed her ropes using the extracts of cochineal insects—a difficult process, she said, given that her materials do not naturally take to these purple acids (to which she has added materials such as iron, resulting in different colorations). But the amount of effort required is in part the point, and it is obvious in the knotting, clearly the result of multiple pairs of hands tinkering at once, with some areas hanging tight while other parts are left slack. Aguiñiga takes the concept of “women’s work” and renders it as, well, just that—and beautifully so. Accordingly, nearly all her assistants are femme-identifying; it is no coincidence, either, that cochineal dye comes exclusively from female insects.
