Tuesday, May 20, 2025

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On the Monday after the opening of Bárbara Sánchez-Kane and Sofía Alazraki’s Fortuna y Fetiche at Dashwood Projects, the East 4th Street outpost of the renowned Dashwood Books, the sun had finally come out and it was already a busy news day. Before Alazraki arrived, Sánchez-Kane and I were speaking about an article in the New York Times about how the Trump administration is desperate for people to have more children through incentivized pregnancy. For the both of us, starting our week out on such an intense piece of news was flattening because it is now shockingly unsurprising when the White House announces insane new programs. But as we began our conversation, this idea of a nostalgia for the past began a discussion on medium and message, and how the digital photographic prints of Fortuna y Fetiche’s erotic found assemblages play with our ideals of desire and the taboo. In our visually driven culture, it seems that almost every piece of information we consume has a pictographic quality—think of weird, conservative, AI-created family values advertisements, two channel TikTok story accounts which play mobile phone game content to engage the viewer, or art installations with built-in selfie rooms to engage the viewer’s body and placate short attentions spans and digitally inflated egos. If these examples of modern imagery exist as easy references to control the body, Sánchez-Kane and Alazraki’s work asks a different question: What happens to us when the body is an absent—and at times erotic—suggestion of an emotional memory, sense, feeling, touch? With Fortuna y Fetiche, the two artists examine the possibilities of suggestion and allusion through plastic blow-up dolls, old shoes, and other contemporary ejecta, which when pieced together invite the viewer to cruise human connection through their exquisite corpses.