Tucked away in a small corner space at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Danila Cervantes’s first solo exhibition, “Laberintos de huesos floreciendo”(Labyrinths of Flowering Bones), offered an intimate rumination on interspecies connections and the porousness that exists between life-forms. Primarily comprising mixed-media drawings and two sculptural works created within the past three years, the exhibition staged a dialogue between process-based work and more refined compositional forms. The presentation followed Cervantes’s broader inquiry into the myriad ways of making and making-with that continue to shape and inform (non)human life.
Many of Cervantes’s drawings reflect a preoccupation with how life-forms—bacterial, vegetal, insect, and crustacean—have been rendered as marginal hierarchies in the Anthropocene. Four of the artist’s works on paper—Maravillas dentro el castillo de las ballenas (Wonders Inside the Castle of Whales), 2024; Castillo de las ballenas (Castle of the Whales), 2024; Castillo de las ballenas studies (Castle of the Whales Studies), 2022; and Spiral animation sequence frames, 2022—visualized these forms through variously twisting exoskeletal and animal bodies. Charcoal, graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor drawings of variously sized microbial and animal bodies were sketched in ascension, moving out of the indigo sea depths and into a rose-colored sky as they float through abstract organic shapes, including a vulvic sun and parting clouds. Framed as a sequence inspired by whale falls—wherein the body of a deceased whale sinks to the ocean floor and, in turn, becomes a thriving habitat for deepwater creatures—Cervantes’s drawings celebrated the fecundity of life found within another’s death.
The re-creation of life through death was especially apparent in the artist’s mixed-media sculpture El Centro, 2024. The work features the desiccated remains of a maguey plant, its dehydrated leaves gray and brittle, fixed within a large, sand-filled clay pot atop a pedestal of tightly bound sticks. A large toad made from the same supple brown clay as the pot is impaled into position by the plant’s spindly leaves, its rotund body seemingly afloat as it grins at the viewer. The artist’s formal play on decorative plant stakes is contrasted with the dead plant, whose leaves, seemingly suspended in time as they reach out toward the viewer and beg for water, appear both enshrined and forgotten—an unsuspecting memorial to nonhuman life and its quotidian forms. With the shadows cast on the brightly lit gallery walls by the plant’s leaves, some reaching over and into neighboring works and appearing as specters, the artist’s rumination on the precarity of life and its traces felt exceptionally poignant.
Cervantes’s consideration of how (and what) life is recognized was expanded upon further in drawings installed near El Centro. Following the formal techniques found within classification charts containing the taxonomic groupings of particular species, mixed-media drawings such as Enano en El Centro (Dwarf in El Centro), 2024, punctuated organizational symmetry with multicolored entwinements. The brightly colored oil pastel and colored pencil on amate depicts an eclectic array of plant, animal, and vegetal life, with small groupings bound together within spherical bursts of color. The artist’s use of amate, a bark-like material traditionally produced in Mexico with Mesoamerican roots, and indigo, a dye with a significant role in colonial economies, combines ongoing concerns surrounding the human/nonhuman divide with historical ones. Cervantes approaches these themes from the vantage point of border life and its biopolitical management along the US-Mexico divide. Works such as Oración: contando estrellas (Prayer: Counting Stars), 2024, a sculptural installation made of seashells, paper, amate, nopal, and silk, offered a rumination on the border, the flow (and cessation) of people and goods, and transformation by way of a draped ocher scroll on which is written, DRUNK DOGS STUTTER ALONG THE LENGTH OF THE RIVER, THEY GUIDE ME TOWARDS THE SOUTH. Hung nearby, Arrastrando la cobija sobre el agua y baila con el reflejo de la luna (Dragging the Blanket over the Water, It Dances with the Moon’s Reflection), 2024, acted as a visual companion, depicting a young girl seated on a boat, calla lilies in hand, as she looks back at blue dogs staring longingly at her from the riverbank. Clutching a dark-blue tapestry that the artist physically affixed to the composition, the girl is depicted in a moment of departure on the Rio Grande—not yet gone but seemingly ready to depart.
While much of Cervantes’s exhibition reflected on the plurality of life and its various agents, the artist’s selection of historically loaded materials and taxonomic aesthetic strategies brings attention to the distinct and varied ways that life is shunted, made possible, and brought together. Embracing the paradoxical ordering of what constitutes nonlife alongside, and often despite, its sociopolitical connotations, “Labertinos de Huesos Florenciendo” eschewed coherent forms of belonging, looking instead toward the varied forms of making and being-with engendered by multispecies entanglements.
