Corotos y Ajuares roughly translates to “odds and ends.” Corotos is a Spanish colloquialism for household objects – akin to how one might refer to everyday items in English as “stuff” or “things.” Lucia Hierro uses the visual language of consumption to dissect our complex relationships to these odds and ends. Working across textile, sculpture, and installation, Hierro points to the capacity of objects to serve as vectors for cultural knowledge, or reflections of self-image, and simultaneously, the ways in which our habits of consumption render us complicit in unsustainable, inequitable economies of production, consumption, and waste.

Corotos y Ajuares brings together a series of soft sculptures and a site-specific mural that collectively focus on household items and consumer goods, like disposable takeout containers, a paper menu, and a pair of aprons. Many of these items reflect Hierro’s specific experiences as an artist within the Dominican diaspora in Manhattan and the Bronx. In the same breath, they speak broadly to the coalescence of community around objects or food, and to our collective participation in a consumer culture that ravenously appropriates and discards culturally specific objects and practices.

Process, material, and scale are key to Hierro’s practice. Her sculptural works often begin with photographic images printed on fabrics such as cotton sateen or suede, which are then stitched together and filled with hard-celled foam. Close inspection reveals traces of Hierro’s process: seams and hand-stitches are deliberately left visible, signifying the artist’s participation in intersecting economies, and honouring a familial history of sewing and textile work.

In a gesture that references histories of advertising and Pop Art, Hierro’s work renders seemingly unremarkable things in oversized scale. The totemic scale of these things – of Dyckman Express’ grease-stained paper bag and receipt, for instance – begs us to consider the vast amount of labour, capital, and resources contained within these disposable materials.

Read altogether, the exhibition’s iconography teases out the networks of production and labour on which we all rely. A collection of aluminum and plastic takeout containers filled with rice, chicken, and beans points simultaneously to agricultural labour and supply chains, grocery vendors, line cooks, gig-economy delivery drivers, and the food delivery apps that atomize and mediate the final portion of these transactions, insulating customers from everything that came before. In this sense, Corotos y Ajuares carries with it the ways in which odds and ends acquire meaning through their passage across space and time, and the widespread reverberations of our habits of consumption.

Part of Exposure Photography Festival 2024.