Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias
The Armory Show 2026
Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias at The Armory Show
New York, 2026
New York, 2026
PRESS RELEASE
Constanza Camila Kramer Garfias
ARMORY SHOW
24–27 September, 2026
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you.”
- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
“In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; ...”
- Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science
In Borges’ famous parable*, zealous cartographers make a map congruent with the territory, mistaking the nature of abstraction. A useless map, destined to blend into the landscape it overlies. This is camouflage, the discovery that our most accurate representation of the world may at best serve to disguise ourselves within it, and notably, to survive.
What does looking at camouflage in isolation from nature reveal about us?
Inversely, in what (dis)guise may nature reveal itself to us in the gallery?
Nature, here and ever, is a cultural concept.
Constanza has a relational view of the environment, and a physical relationship with abstraction. In this Armory presentation, she plays with early maps and colonial records concerning her native land, leery of the power structures they both mask and reinforce, the way they quantify and control, but also obscure the natural world. She looks again, at the earth and the plants and the animals, adopting their irreverent lushness and resilience and openness as her artistic method.
Kramer-Garfias takes these threads** in hand, and re-mixes them using a jacquard loom (arguably the proto-computer, the first industrial automaton built to store zeroes and ones, and process them into new and intricate structures). She then starts unpicking the same threads as soon as they have been woven, introducing tender uncertainties and a sense of gradual transition between world and art, wall and piece. She cuts and re-layers, undoes and embroiders. This cyclical flow of construction and its opposite
results in artworks alive with contradictions and change, animated by ideas and the patient practice of the weaver.
* Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares (as Suárez Miranda), Del rigor en la ciencia (1946)
** “Threads” of course, made since time immemorial by twisting fibers into a product with tensile strength and no end in sight, are the blindingly obvious metaphor (the prima materia to suspend things by), symbol of human ingenuity and industriousness, with its protective and load-bearin function, and the generosity with which it always also served as a pictorial surface.
