I first encountered Florencia Escudero’s work at NADA in Miami in 2022, where she exhibited small scale hand sewn sculptures. The work lived somewhere between an organic being and birthed from the internet. Her sculptures are highly detailed but not overworked, they feel familiar and wildly unknown at the same time. Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with with Escudero about her studio practice and how she lives her life as an artist in New York City. Her next solo exhibition at Kristen Lorello Gallery and a simultaneous show at Rachel Uffner, will both open in April of this year. Escudero’s work is mixed media, rooted in textiles, sculpture, and image manipulation. Her life of observation fuels a rich repository of image collections, full of absurdities of the internet, daily advertisements, and bodily forms.

Florencia Escudero was born in Singapore in and grew up in Mendoza, Argentina. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Escudero received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 2012 and a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2010. Works by Escudero have been discussed in Editorial Magazine, Aether Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, The American Reader, Cultured Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. She is an editor and founder of Precog Magazine.

Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Florencia Escudero

A: Can you talk about what you are working on for your upcoming exhibitions?

F: I’m currently working on a series of sculptures for a solo show opening April 26th in two locations in New York, at Kristen Lorello and Rachel Uffner.  I’m continuing to work on vases but they are getting a lot bigger! Because of the scale they are less of faces,more of a container for elements like water, dust, and heat. The vases are covered in digitally designed and printed photographs in which I combine photos from interiors of the love hotel with online imagery I collect or make myself. 

Then I layer them with silk-screened textures, sewn and painted on with resin. There are still bodily forms, like organs and ears,  and the figure of the snake/snake woman is in a lot of the work.  A lot of people associate my work with the surreal but a lot of the inspiration and references come from reality of the web, and of this fantasy space I have been obsessed with for a decade now! 

A: There seems to be elements of humor and some body horror in your work – can you talk about the origins of some of your ideas?

F: I am not trying to be funny, sometimes people tell me my work is disturbing! 

In the work there is an uncanny quality being explored, human bodies becoming re-arranged  and juxtaposed with other elements in an unexpected way. I think that this can be surprising and this causes people to laugh. 

A: So what does your life look like as an artist, big picture right now? How do you structure your time? 

F: The cost of living in New York is high so I am constantly juggling different jobs which include teaching and fabricating props for different clients.  Because of this I have to be very organized and careful with my time so I can find a way to go to the studio. By now I know how long it takes me to make a sculpture and I always work on a group of 8 to 10 of them at the same time.  Even though I spend most of my time working I think it’s important to look at art and I always set time aside for working on collaborative projects like Precog, the annual magazine I have been working on with Gaby Collins-Fernandez and Kellie Konapelsky for 7 years. 

A: What does an ideal studio day look like for you?

F: Since I spend a lot of time on the subway I read a lot, and this helps me get ready to go in and work. The first thing I do is immediately eat all my snacks, and then I put on a show/ the radio and get to work.  When I’m at the studio I constantly chip away at my sculptures, figuring out 3d models, patterns, sewing , casting… It’s very tedious ! I’m not sure if an ideal day exists but I do find it satisfying when something that I’ve been working on for a while finally comes together. Last summer I was fortunate to have been selected for a residency through Collarworks and was able to stay at Elizabeth Murray’s house for two weeks. This was a great experience because it really gave me the opportunity to rest and recover which is also an important part of the process. 

A: What inspires your imagery or forms, are there big themes that are always present, or particular references you are really into right now?

F: A lot of my work references commercial goods such as sex dolls, fast fashion, jewelry,  anatomy and the internet’s visual landscape. I’m always interested in themes of love, romance, power, and desire, and how these feelings manifest themselves.  In my work there are a lot of recognizable symbols such as butterflies, hearts, kisses, and roses. Right now I am really interested in the NPC culture that is trending on TikTok,  where women and men pretend to be these robotic characters and get  people to send them money through  micropayments of a cent  if they say a line from a video game script like “Ice cream so good,” for example. The payments get sent in the form of different emojis and it’s this live event that thousands of people stream to watch. In past shows I was thinking about how objects become anthropomorphized but now I’m looking at how humans are imitating machines.

A: Your work has such an interesting interplay of high/low – are there specific ways you think about taste and visual culture?

F: This is hard to answer because it’s hard to distinguish what is high/ low anymore since trends cycle so fast and  different iconic objects become appropriated.  For example it used to be radical for a rapper to aspire to wear Tommy Hilfiger in the 80s but now the brand has embraced this customer. I think a lot about how a design circulates, trickles down, and then evolves into something new. Right now in this new body of work I have been looking at the idea of the naked dress This is a dress that can be a trompe l’oeil effect of a printed body, or it can also be dresses/bodysuits that are made of skin-colored mesh with  rhinestones glued on.  I was reading about Britney Spears and how in her video she seems to be wearing this kind of suit but actually each rhinestone was glued on her body directly.  We are living in what feels like a very conservative time and there is this tension with sexuality—there is a play on the illusion of being naked while being fully clothed. There’s also the star shaped acne healing stickers that are worn as accessories that take something embarrassing and turn it into a beauty mark like aristocrats used to do—see it as an extension of what’s happening on the web, filters and emojis becoming part of our physical reality. 

A: Can you talk about Precog Magazine and how it started?

F: It started right after school! I was talking to my friend Gaby about reading and how I missed being able to talk through a text with someone, and we tried to start a book club but that failed because no one else wanted to do it. So we decided to make a zine with the people from the original book club and we printed out the pages of the zine and ironed them onto shirts. We were lucky to have the opportunity to sell our zines at the New York art book fair and the shirts were a hit! This helped us fund the next issue and we have continued to grow, and now each issue is way more ambitious than the last!  We collaborate with our friend Kellie Konapelsky on the design and it’s a constant process of looking for cool artists, sending out a prompt, and organizing all the submissions. It’s a lot of work but its very rewarding.  

A: Is there anything else you like to do with your life outside of the arts? 

F: Yes! Of course!!! But is there anything that can’t be considered an art form?