Performance with Carmen Argote

Saturday, November 15, 2025 | 2:00 p.m.
SFAC Main Gallery
Free and open to the public

The hand is the first stamp and the first stencil 

It is the first touch 

The first transference 

Holding, hiding 

The first pushing away 

The “perimeter” has long been a point of reference in LA-based artist Carmen Argote’s work. For this performance, To Bright Disturbances exhibiting artist Argote pushes along the edges of her discomfort, her interior architecture, and her own boundaries and limits within the navigation of binary systems of thinking and perception. The work will incorporate performance, photography, and drawing. 

This performance is an iteration of a work (first done in 2020 in the artist's home) that surfaced into a more complete iteration while in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in summer 2025. 
 

To Bright Disturbances is a group exhibition which explores land use, and in particular the ways in which we utilize the land can be at many times extractive, devastating, and at times, restorative. It will be on view in the Main Gallery through December 13, 2025. 
 

About the artist

Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Their work often points to the body, class, and economic structures in relation to architecture and personal history. Argote’s practice draws upon their immediate environment and the networks of labor and consumption that mark these spaces. She manifests these connections through drawings, paintings, site-specific sculpture, installation, and performance that directly reference the visual language of abstraction. Argote received their MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, carmenargote.com