'Blossoming Carcass' by ASMA at Make Room, Los Angeles

Make Room is pleased to present Blossoming Carcass, an exhibition of new works by artist duo ASMA. The exhibition extends the duo’s experimental, sensational, and embodied exploration of how objects enter into a conversation with the world they inhabit. Blossoming Carcass features a series of sculptures, paintings, and installations in the metaphor of an exoskeleton. Echoing a fantastical language, this process of molting as a poetic transformation speaks to the human experiences of letting go, mourning, and reviving: a process similar to that of the insect leaving its pupal body to grow larger.

The artists’ collaborative practice enables the coexistence of differences. In this new body of works, an imaginary space connects a series of compelling personal narratives of death and love. Both the imaginary and the real elements merge in material and figurative manners, transforming them into a third space—a poem about a blossoming carcass as a continuation of life after death. In this abandoned place, growth continues, and the vestiges of a previous natural life mutate into new forms.

A long, gray creature extends across the gallery space like a snake rising with its mouth open. It emerges from far back, through a small, fenced window that connects two different areas. Behind this window, there is a room with a sand-covered floor, where the other end of the gray creature originates, lying on top of the sand and thus inhabiting both spaces. A flowerlike pendulum hangs in the center of the sand room, moving subtly and leaving its marks on the sand. The pendulum sculpture is cast in bronze, shaped like a flat drawing. Tea leaves are suspended in its resin, mimicking a stained-glass ornament, and it holds a rolled-up green leaf in a pocket at its center. Like an abstract form of a sand clock, the sculpture becomes a scribe of its own movement on the impermanent sand surface. The sculpture also functions as a container, holding leaves at different stages of their decay, generating a process of cultivation. In the corner of the room, a dark, organically- shaped bowl contains murky water with aquatic mosses and an organism-like figure at the bottom, appearing through the sediment.

Blossoming Carcass narrates the story of a living skeleton-keeper and her relationship with the creatures in her care. Fragments of this narrative are combined with a material interplay that oscillates between sculptural and painted qualities. In this conjunction, the exoskeleton is an exchange between the structure and the surface, a coexistence of two states. A delicate feeling of otherness comes from within, evoking a familiar sensation linked with the similar human capacity for transformation. The process of molting is taking place slowly, and its remnants occupy the space in an apparent stillness.