This weekend, I visited the New Museum in New York City and had the opportunity to experience Carmen Agote’s “As Above, So Below”. As a Los Angeles-based artist from Guadalajara, Mexico, Agote explores the familiar materials used in Mexican agriculture and architecture to create texture in her pieces. She incorporates native plants, natural pigments, and geometric architecture to layer her Mexican roots beneath her experience as a Mexican immigrant in the United States. She brings the earth to the heavens, using “As Above, So Below” as her exhibition title. When I read the meaning of the title in her biography at the museum, it explained that it comes from a maxim associated with “sacred geometry and tarot that construes the celestial world as a reflection of the celestial one”.
