FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Lucia Hierro | Mercado
January 27 – February 24, 2018
Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present Lucia Hierro’s new work in Mercado. In this presentation, the artist introduces a new archetype for her first solo gallery exhibition in New York. A series of soft assemblage sculptural objects on the walls and floor fill the front gallery, utilizing a broad platform of techniques that include digital media, painting, installation art, sculpture and color theory---as tools to tackle ideas of cultural and economic exclusion and privilege. Resembling outsized semi-translucent bags on epic scale, the new works borrow from pop culture, the history of art, everyday items of the working class in the US and the Caribbean, such as supermarket circulars and banal generic remedies. The monumentality of her work, and elevation of the status of objects through her unique visual strategy, engages the viewer in a discourse on issues of class, culture, identity and gender. The works in this series explore the symbiotic relationship between personal narrative, subjective and collective discourse that is as urgent as it is symbolic of our time.
For Mercado, Hierro intentionally incorporates objects and images familiar and unfamiliar to her audience as way to frame, skew, abstract, repackage, reexamine and question these objects’ place in our daily lives and our place in the objects’ everyday distribution. By “filtering” our engagement with these products, Hierro creates an environment that makes both looking and the act of recognition complicit in a larger global construct.
Lucia Hierro is a Dominican American conceptual artist born and raised in Washington Heights, NYC. She lives and works in The Bronx. She received a BFA from SUNY Purchase (2010) and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2013). She has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, IPCNY (in the traveling group exhibition "Black Pulp"), and had a recent solo at the Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art and Storytelling. Hierro was included in the 2017 inaugural edition of Selections by Larry Ossei-Mensah at Elizabeth Dee. Artists’ residencies include Fountainhead Residency, The Bronx Museum of the Arts Artist in the Marketplace program, Yaddo, and the Red Bull House of Art in Detroit.
Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah
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