Danica Barboza’s art in a new exhibition at the gallery LOMEX in New York City is gravitational and transfixing. I felt pleasantly stuck in front of it.
Showcased in the exhibition, Barboza created assemblages of wide-ranging, repurposed materials that looked, honestly, distinctly together in their new environments as art pieces.
There was a weird sense of home in how comprehensive I found that feeling in these compounding, unmoored visuals and their attendant sensations.
Though so varying, Barboza’s materials felt strangely similar and surprisingly reflective of each other, as though each object pulled those nearby closer. Spatial relationships between the objects tended to complement or culminate rather than pull apart.
In “The Opposite of Super-Fluidity,” a 2025 piece that centers on a storage drawer around which materials including a shower curtain, a sculpture of a bust caught in a state disembodied and grueling, and keyboards are assembled, everything points upward to that sculpted face. The face’s level of detail gives the distinct outline of someone in particular, though many specifics are not filled in — and one side looks in flux, left starkly imprecise.
The material palette across all these artworks circulated around not the same, specific kind of original use for the repurposed objects, but I still sensed a commonality via original intentions of at least some sort — all of which are, in this new context, out the window. The functions of each form are wrested into something new.
I get the sense the original intentions behind many of the included items were personal and individualized. These materials — like, in another piece from the show, tape decks and a Christmas tree holder — were largely meant for an individual to utilize in some practical but indoors application, steeped in the artifice of that. Another of Barboza’s artworks includes piano wood and a lamp.
It’s obvious what much of this originally was (as opposed to a piece of an artwork), and much of what’s on display within the assemblage pieces has a blunt forwardness to it in general that feels inherent to the object. There’s a brusque, matter-of-fact air around the way it grabs your attention. It’s here, plainly.
And you get the sense it originally came with an unfolding, background environment of ambitions to eventually not have to think about the subject anymore. Some of these household or just practical goods, they’re probably at their assumed best when we can take them for granted, reliably leaning on their functions. But here, that’s not the case anymore. The assortment of materials is ripping into your awareness.
Each repurposed object’s original direction is no longer an active factor, so we’re left with a ghost. In each case, what we’re looking at holds a reflection of what the thing once was without holding the substance, the definition, the core, and the specificity. It’s not just an intellectual exercise in the simple reuse of objects, either; that progression feels aesthetically inherent to what I’m looking at, a sense of… falling.
I’m immersed within the outline of a person without actually seeing one.
A couple of Barboza’s artworks had portions resembling even the human form, with skins of collaged paper and tape. And yet, these figures had no heads, though heads and faces appeared elsewhere in the show, including in accompanying works on paper and canvas.
The incisive nature of so many visual points across these artworks brings me towards my own many memories of something very specific.
I think about lost experiences, moments pushed into the past by the arrival of even more. They become so persistent they transform into a materialization. I see them as such, the colors I witness now like trail lights directing me backwards.
I start to think about a once meaningful slip of paper, or a lost childhood trophy, or bathroom rags and mats that I looked at for a while and took for granted… or household appliances that once were so central and now, are not.
Contemplated in the context of Barboza’s art, it’s all stark and solitary, each one a flag against its own horizon.
The artworks prompt me towards what feels like emptiness surrounding and rolling outwards from sensory memories I encounter. They’re weirdly isolated. After a while, they are of themselves and defined as such… internally propulsive systems of their own. The sense drives itself.
These immaterial, inwardly carried relics are not going away. They hurl themselves forward; even devoid of their original context and in a new one defined by lack, they push. You’re left with just the force of it.
In the exhibition, I felt sometimes as though what I was looking at was not grounded to any particular place at all. But it remained, and it was hungry.
Danica Barboza: “Void Beside a Desire Machine” closes this weekend (June 28) at LOMEX. Best wishes to the gallery and artist; I loved the show.
