tetillas

Taking a slang word, both small breasts and a rural Spanish cheese, ́tetillas ́ sets Darya Diamond and Esther Gatón to present recent and representative works from their respective oeuvres. Developed from friendship, tetillas is an intimate reflection on the conditions of labour experienced by these artists, interiors, and femininity. Among the various works, Gatón presents wall pieces assembled of hand-dyed fabric and bundled wood. Diamond brings resin-cast waste brackets, that the artist stole from the motels where she worked as a prostitute. Peripherally co-regulatory and permeable, Diamond and Gatón use extensions of their private lives as materials in their studio practice. Evoking touch, complex intimacies and blurry representations of their immediate environments- the exhibition unintentionally re-contextualizes domestic and precarious labour. Gatón’s textiles are at once tactile and layered, echoing a physical encounter with the material and processes of dying and fading fabrics. Her practice is haunted by the stark aesthetics of Castile, the deserted Spanish region where she grew up; while Diamond ́s originates in the artist ́s invisible labour as a surrogate human, sex worker, and carer. With the use of illegible and fainted traces, painted on the textiles, Gatón aims to tap into an infantile type of vision; one that engulfs everything around itself and stays stupefied, as much by the wound that pierces its knee, as by the enormous altarpiece, covered in gold leaf. Such an outsider way of looking could be allied with the illusions that sex workers like Diamond need to perform, to manufacture conventional forms of intimacy and emotional transit. The encounter between the two artists aims to create reverberations between these contrasting positions, offering an exhibition that presents relationships of power through the reappropriation of oral and visual narratives, domesticity, the ambivalence of desire and its strange embodiments, and the ability of rescued objects to convey ordinary fantasies by distorting them. Formally, Diamond and Gatón come from different backgrounds, yet their practices connect deeply, addressing varied forms of eroticism and female-identified social presence. Oscillating between permeable ‘pleasure’ and ‘pleasing’ work. There is a gentle framing of reproductive labour, the status of sexuality and domesticity as precarious and invaluable economies that take place inside the home.