Objects of Desire
Naranjo 141 gallery and residency, Mexico City
by Ben Adams-Keane, November 27, 2024
The Naranjo 141 gallery and residency is not a place you’ll just happen upon if you’re wandering around Roma and Condesa. Founders Ashley Noyes and Bryce Smith did not go for a typical austere, white-walled gallery space, but instead landed on a townhouse in Santa María, a colony an hours-walk north of Avenida Álvaro Obregón that’s home to many more artist’s studios than galleries. The off-the-beaten path journey to visit the space is a fitting prelude to their latest show, Objects of Desire, which brings together eleven female artists from the Americas, Europe and Asia whose work contends with the distances that our desires compel us to cover.
Only a few of the artists in the show actually depict objects. Rather than preoccupy itself with materiality, as the title might seem to suggest, or with the connotations of desire, as a more clumsily conceived show might ask of an all-female cast, Objects of Desire seems to be concerned with something much more elusive: The fleeting moments we perceive to be more material, more permanent, more calcified than any physical object. Scenes of sincerity, glimpses of the natural world under light, and performative figures are rendered with varying tenderness, banality and wit, offering a survey of the experiences, feelings, and sights that captivate without succumbing to any prescriptive definition of what an object of desire must be. Here, an object is whatever holds the artist’s attention, and desire is the ephemeral force binding the two of them together.
