After a visit to Mexico, I often return to the immortal words of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose groundbreaking 1998 essay-memoir-poetry collection Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza articulated what it means to be Chicanx and live on the US-side of the US-Mexico border. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them,” she wrote nearly three decades ago. While a border serves as “a dividing line,” a borderland is “a vague and undetermined place,” one that is in “a constant state of transition.” 

What does it mean to be in diaspora when one’s ancestral land is so close it can be in spitting distance? And what does it mean to return to that land? In a way, that is the premise of a two-person exhibition at Commonwealth and Council gallery’s location in Mexico City (away from its home base in Los Angeles). For a show titled “WACHA: viajes transtemporales” (on view through March 30), rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales, both raised in LA and now based there, consider their respective relationships to Mexico for a collaboration, their second in the past six months. (With Mario Ayala, they mounted a joint exhibition at SFMOMA that looked at their relationship to cruising, both in low riders and of people.)

Memory plays a key role. The exhibition opens with a two-panel painting on adobe by esparza titled Colosio en lomas taurinas, despues del guardado (2024). The dense composition depicts Mexican politician Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta during a 1994 presidential campaign rally in the Tijuana neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas. A joyous crowd looks at an empty silhouette suggesting the presence of Colosio, who was assassinated that day and whose death was deeply felt on both sides of the border. Is the scene in the painting the moment right before joy turns into terror? esparza leaves it vague. All that remains is the ghostly specter of Colosio’s silhouette.

For her contribution, Rosales presents two stunning photographs of the hoods of souped-up low riders that double as hard-edge abstractions in dazzling colors and glitter. The edges of the cars, the pavement below, and the reflections of palm trees onto their glimmering hoods are visions that caught the artist’s eye, something she wanted to remember. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Rosales shows her recent turn to sculpture, including X100PRE (2024), which collages together archival materials beneath a sheet of red plexiglass that is emblazoned with the word FOREVER and topped with eight pairs of black sunglasses arranged in a ring.

The show’s most touching piece is another adobe painting by esparza. Unlike Colosio, it is mostly raw adobe, an empty expanse of brown that frames, at the work’s center, a rendering of a wallet-size photograph showing esparza with his brother and sister as children. His sister died during childhood, and this is a photograph that he carries with him daily. The painting’s title is Y los restos de tu pequeño rostro serán mi conexión más profunda a México (And the remains of your little face will be my deepest connection to Mexico).

In another room by itself is a joint installation that pairs Rosales’s hanging mirrored-glass disco ball in the shape of two pyramids (shipped from her installation in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made in L.A. biennial) with a collaborative sculpture below. In that piece, a hand-like armature, made from silver buckles and braided fabric belts, rises from tiles of black obsidian that look like a pool surrounded by a terrace of adobe bricks. Engraved on the obsidian is the work’s title: Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente. Literally, it translates to “Eyes that don’t see, heart that doesn’t feel.” But it can be interpreted in other ways, like “What they don’t know, won’t hurt them” or “Out of sight, out of mind.” When thinking of Mexico and the artists’ relationship to this ancestral land, both make sense—hauntingly beautiful sense.

Bringing together forty-seven works (eighteen of them videos) in four large galleries, a hallway, and a terrace, the exhibition is overwhelming, at times, crushingly so. The artworks portray mothers, whether gestating, birthing, or caring, as constantly navigating a sea of jarring misunderstandings. When not objects of romanticization and idealization, they are often victims of undervaluation and erasure. At the extreme, the artist collective Claire Fontaine, writing in the publication that accompanies the show, views reproductive work as “a total and absolute loss.”

That assertion becomes seemingly paradoxical at the exhibition’s very entrance, where Fontaine’s Women Raise the Upraising (2021), a huge yellow sign with three-dimensional letters spelling the work’s title—which echoes the language from scholar-activist Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework (1975)—hangs right above a cubicle containing Flinn Works’s Global Belly (2021), an installation of four videos in which performers wryly narrate the particulars of transnational surrogacy, an especially fraught industry. In one clip, on a Zoom call, a “German Father” gushes about the magic of the process, expressing gratitude for the bio-technology that allows him to pay for the creation of his own child; another scene features a “U.S. Surrogate,” so happy and so fulfilled when pregnant, always willing to do it again for the appropriate remuneration; and finally we see a “Hindu Doctor” condescendingly congratulating one of her patients, as she knows twins mean a monetary bonus (smile!). Not all is lost, at least not financially, when motherhood can be a livelihood. 

View of “Maternar,” 2022, at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, showing Claire Fontaine, Women Raise the Upraising, 2021; Flinn Works, Global Belly, 2021; and Carmen Winant, Why are these our only alternatives and what kind of struggle will move us beyond them?, 2021.

The point that Fontaine makes in the essay, however, is not to dispute that people with uteruses in this economy can convert their bodily functions into cold hard cash (they can), but to claim that motherhood is a net loss in the physiological sense, because its ultimate objective is to become less and less needed as children grow. However, if this “physiological cycle of motherhood” used to mean nothing but loss, today, within our capitalist economy—which prioritizes accumulation above all—as with most other labor, it has been divided into parts and commodified: someone can now purchase a fertilized egg or rent a guaranteed uterus to then fulfill one’s desire for bottomless love/loss, and have others fulfill just the portion of motherhood that precariously results for them in financial gain. Who’s to stop the obscenely wealthy musician Grimes or socialite Kim Kardashian from outsourcing the dangers of pregnancy that they themselves experienced to a less privileged body, thus starting out motherhood with a lesser physiological net loss? For them, care can be outsourced, motherhood purchased. Reality is of course more complicated than Fontaine’s idea of “total loss” suggests. Financial gain might be attainable, but the limit between labor and reproduction has become even fuzzier—one could say even more unfair. 

This tricky relationship between mothering and productivity, reproduction and production, is teased out in relation to art-making in Moyra Davey’s beautiful Hemlock Forest (2016). In the 41-minute video, the artist entwines loose meditations on motherhood, landscapes, and death with her own work, her family’s and her own personal experiences, and the lives and works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Chantal Akerman. As Davey records her musings on her phone, reflecting on her life sometimes in the third person, pacing around sun-drenched domestic settings or eating marshmallows in bed and putting her shoes on her pillow, she confesses she’s not one for idle pleasures and that she feels alive when “she is behind the camera . . . when she is making something.” Davey’s imagery quotes Akerman’s in News from Home (1977), a movie about a mother waiting for news of her daughter, while Davey too frets in the video about the clichéd emotions of becoming an empty nester. 

Núria Güell: Annex to Afrodita (2017) for Who Cares? Festival, 2020, poster, 8 ¼ by 11 ½ inches.

Davey’s transmutation of the autobiographical into art sets the stage for some of the efforts in the last gallery. Take Núria Güell’s Annex to Afrodita (2017) for Who Cares? Festival, 2020. With the budget she got from a German festival dedicated to the idea of care-giving, Güell created a poster with an image of herself and her child playing in a kiddie pool, combined with text in red letters: WHAT DOES CARE-GIVING TAKE CARE OF? WHERE DOES CARE START? WHERE DOES IT END? WHO TAKES CARE OF WHOM? In a handwritten note placed next to the poster, the artist explains that she was commissioned to create new work for 400 euros (about $436), that she needed the money but had no chance of making one of her research-based, collaborative works within the reduced hours that home confinement imposed on her during the pandemic, and that she straightforwardly decided to depict the act of caring for her son as the work itself. Similarly, in the video Gravity, Exercise 1 (2020), Paloma Calle manages to literally embody the weight of imposed, nonstop cycles of caregiving during the pandemic. The artist lies naked on the floor of her apartment, wearing an N95 mask, and looks straight at the camera as a kid, likely her own, piles the debris of domestic drudgery on top of her: a cooking pan, some cans of soda, a chess board, bananas. Her body holds up both the care work and the artistic work. To extend Güell’s questions further: Is the kid an artist too? Does he care for her by collaborating? As this and the other works on view repeatedly emphasize, the lines between love and labor are, again, fuzzy. Could we imagine another system, Calle and others seem to ask, in which the distinctions might be not just clearer, but also more generous and less individualized, with both aspects becoming more fulfilling for those involved?

The show is at its best when focused on this question of how and why productive and reproductive work are distinguished. However, in the curators’ encyclopedic ambitions, their eagerness to represent many experiences of mothering—other works on view address the joy of adoptive motherhood, the experience of breastfeeding, and even the fantasy post-human pregnancy—at times dilutes the show’s potency. Davey’s video is one of three projected simultaneously in one room, and it plays right next to hour-long documentaries that discuss gynecological curiosities and infanticide. In the first gallery, Cristina Llanos’s “The Secret Pact”: Exercises in Preparing for Childbirth (2014–21), a mural emphasizing the painful experience of giving birth, often kept from expectant mothers in the hope they will retain and thus embody the idealized experience of it, sits right next to Global Belly, almost making the sarcastic video performance feel like a viable, acritical advertisement for surrogacy. Perhaps if the curators had given the artworks more space to breathe, the sharp, necessary questions the show posits might have been clearer. In its low points, the exhibition reads as a generalizing catalogue of mothering practices over a deep discussion of the inevitable clash between the endless demands for work-life productivity and the expectations of endless love and care projected on those who mother.

In Mao’s latest exhibition, at Campeche, his interest in local architecture and choice of primary materials remained steady, but the works’ forms were more oriented toward the past. At the center of the gallery sat fig 33.1-5 yerba mala (2021), a complex platform that emulates the shape of the many stepped pyramids in Mexico but is rendered in a series of dark steel modules that hold, support, and restrain additional elements comprising minerals, metal, leather, and ceramic. Whereas Mao’s prior works tended to stand around like lone, colorful, kinky individuals, this sculpture involves more interconnected pieces and a more dynamic collective stance. At the very front sits a massive teal cat’s paw, claws out. Behind it, a few of the modules hold gold- and nickel-plated volcanic rocks, perhaps Central Mexico’s most abundant material. Other garnishes include leather straps, but the ceramic elements are the most striking. A steel platform in the middle of the work suspends two bulbous, lunglike forms made of red ceramic punctured by white braces that have a clinical flair. At the very back, a curved cylindrical form in black and white with spiky fins dangles from another module. Above it is another teal paw with the menacing detail of a pinky nail replaced by sharp metal. Mao’s pyramid comes to articulate a body, but a nonhuman one: the almighty jaguar of so many Mesoamerican legends. It’s as if the restricted body of previous works has come into newfound power—within, or in spite of, certain constraints.

Yeni Mao, fig 33.6 to lay in the great city, 2022, gold-plated, steel, leather, hardware, 140 by 8 by 3 inches.

The rest of the show displayed Mao’s further experiments with his roster of materials. Fig 33.6 to lay in the great city (2022) is a beautifully detailed gold-plated chain that hung from the ceiling and coiled on the floor, featuring five pairs of leather cuffs at the top. Continuing this formal thread are a knot of two white ceramic snakes evocatively titled fig 27.3 i’m never like this when i’m not with you (2022) and a black serpent dangling from its midsection in a punitory fashion, coiling on itself, almost bashful. Mao’s allusions to highly symbolic mythical creatures—great felines, snakes—juxtaposed with the material and literal vocabulary of sex play, seemed to posit the possibility that knowledge can be found, or made, in the ungoverned experiencing of our bodies, inside and out.

A weird addition to the group was fig 32.01 blossom (2021), a series of organic-looking, pink ceramic plates that covered a column in the gallery. The pieces’ fleshy texture, holes, and sprouting horns suggest an experiment gone wrong, like impulse-buying a new lotion and ending up with a rash. Given its mix-and-match collection of objects, Mao’s show felt transitional, a stage between his bleary-eyed obsession with local construction and design and a more experimental approach to its materials. The latest sculptures, although their internal juxtapositions are sometimes hard to read, seem intended to balance future embodied desires with past built aesthetics.

The central painting on view at House of Gaga is Tomo VI: 16 de Septiembre con 5 de Febrero, whose title points to two streets, named for dates, that intersect at the corner of Mexico City’s zocalo, a densely populated crossroads that Guerrero depicts in mostly blue and green hues. Guerrero’s brushstrokes stay mostly broad, aqueous, and translucent in portraying the watchful mass at the forefront, including what looks like a family grasping each other’s arms so as to not get separated in the crowd; the brushwork gets more intricate in the background, where thinner black lines delicately render the cathedral, and then looser again on the lilac-hued, ominous sky, captured in a strange light that makes it hard to pinpoint the time.

Most of Guerrero’s painted locales and interactions remain recognizable today, even in a city that is constantly transforming; the crowds at the zocalo metro station remain tightly packed during rush hour, and a cloud of pollution still paints the sky weird colors. At the same time, the paintings feel like the stories and legends in the original publications—ghosts from another time. It is hard to keep a record of Mexico City’s multitudes, but Guerrero’s delightful portraits do a pretty decent job.

In this handful of works, the Brazilian-Swiss artist weaves a tender cosmology where creatures of all kinds meet: earthly and otherworldly, large and small, weird and mundane. In Filhota, set against a field of tie-dyed midnight blue and lime green that is at once celestial and psychedelic, a dreamy centipede circling the center of the composition fixes its buggy eyes on an anthropomorphized butterfly with pouty red lips waving flirtily from the lower left corner. They are surrounded by a similar cast of characters: a buzzing fly with vibrating wings delicately stitched in lilac and pink, a dragonfly with squiggly limbs, a round little bumblebee. The Night Shift suggests a similarly lively after-hours get together. A naked angel with a menacing smile stands on the face of a grimacing flower as a worm playfully chews on its petal. Above them, a dragonfly pursues a butterfly, and another pair of winged insects share a cocktail. In this nocturnal scene, de Magalhaes plays with the cheerful animism typical of children’s books, where teacups and shoes possess names and emotions, but uses it to different ends, imagining living beings that we tend to regard as objects, like flowers and insects, sharing martinis and engaging in light bondage.

Only two of the works depict humans directly. In Two Gardeners, a figure peers her eye into a hole in the dirt to find a worm’s eye looking back. The worm is the neighbor of a pair of beets, and a cross section of their underground abode takes up most of the image; the view de Magalhaes presents is their world peering into ours instead of the other way around. But the stunning Pyromania complicates the borders between us and them entirely: delineated in yellow on a pink ground is the outline of a woman’s body viewed from the back, with snails, butterflies, worms, and centipedes catching a ride on top as she crawls away, all surrounded by vibrating, fiery lines. A tangle of human and nonhuman limbs, heads, and eyes, the scene seems less like an emergency exit from a fire than an ecstatic, hallucinatory communion, the euphoric dissolution of boundaries.

De Magalhaes’s works remind us of a reality that has become more painfully obvious lately: that nonhuman beings are not and have never been separate from us, that we are all symbiotic partners, sharing a planet—and even our individual bodies—with visible or invisible collaborators. Her depiction of this coexistence as enchanted and poetic offers a welcome glimpse of fairy-tale hope in a world that feels like it’s nearing the end.

Neoliberalism was also at the heart of Yoshua Okón’s exhibition “Oraculo” (Oracle), which presented works that the Mexico City–based artist, who began his career in the 1990s, made between 2011 and 2019. In his quest to expose how messed-up our economic-political system is, Okón depicts its effects on people who are merely cogs in the machine. For his video series “Oríllese a la Orilla” (1999–2000), Okón paid Mexico City cops to do embarrassing dances or get beat up, using his privilege as an affluent Mexican to bribe low-wage workers—Mexico City cops make less than five hundred dollars a month—into humiliating situations that were supposed to . . . do what exactly? Show the audience how easily corrupted underpaid Mexican cops are? Show, in other words, that water is wet?

In a two-channel video on view in the exhibition, Oracle (2015), Okón is again anything but subtle. The work shows a dozen members of the Arizona Border Defenders, a “volunteer border watch organization,” restaging a protest from 2015, when the group was raging against a busload of unaccompanied children who were expected to be held in the town of Oracle, Arizona. In the video, the Border Defenders march in the middle of the desert, wave American and DON’T TREAD ON ME flags, and do donuts in their cars while firing automatic weapons. In a particularly unhinged sequence, a man in a pickup truck talks big game about how anyone trying to enter the United States illegally will be entering hell, how Americans are not to be messed with—his sentences punctuated by seemingly involuntary discharges of his weapon. As if this weren’t enough, we are shown signs on fences bearing slogans like “Does my American flag offend you? Call 1-800 LEAVE THE USA” and “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

View of Yoshua Okón’s exhibition “Oraculo” (Oracle), 2020, at Proyectos Monclova.

Another two-channel video installation on view, Fridge-Freezer (2015), is a dreamlike portrayal of three realtors attempting to sell nearly identical versions of a prefab house in the suburbs of Manchester, UK. The women exaggerate the selling points, and between pitches they suffer seizures, crying fits, and panic attacks in the homes’ staged interiors. In Okón’s carefully crafted scenarios, these women seem tormented by the fakeness of the dream they peddle. Elsewhere in the same room, a one-minute video of a model of a Banana Republic store going up in flames, República Bananera (2019), played on a screen near the charred remains of a fiberglass zebra, elephant, and clothes. The critique that supposedly tied together the two installations in this room was flimsy: could the aspirational vices of consuming midrange clothing and dreaming of three-bedroom homes be the root of our problems?

That Okón’s critique of the neoliberal system often involves castigating members of classes less fortunate than his own appears to be no coincidence, considering his recent interview with Aristégui Noticias, a local news site, in which he claimed that capitalism and market-centric logic could work, just not in their evil neoliberal versions. A little exploitation is OK. Burn it all down—as the text accompanying the exhibition proposed—but maybe not all of it.

This article appears under the title “Yoshua Okón” in the March 2020 issue, pp. 87–88.

At the exhibition’s entrance hung three paintings depicting figures who refuse to meet the viewer’s gaze: a supine man with closed eyes bathed in a wash of bright colors; a short-haired boy with downcast eyes emerging from dark blue shadows; and a young man with his head turned, his wavy brown hair curling away from his smooth, pale nape. These works contrasted with a more confrontational portrait displayed across the room, whose subject stares at the viewer from under a dark unibrow, posing like a youthful outlaw, his chin down and a cigarette dangling from his lips. Hung in the gallery’s second room was a painting in which another ephebic young man looks out through side-swept, floppy hair—like Justin Bieber’s, or Robert Redford’s in the ’70s—with shadowy eyes and a pink, parted mouth. The image reveals little of his body except for an exposed nipple and a hand grazing his cheek, but conveys a sense of lively desire offset by the ashen quality of his skin.

Paul P.: Untitled, 2017, watercolor on paper, 11 1/2 by 7 1/4 inches; at Lulu.

P. often cites nineteenth-century portraitists like James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Thomas Eakins as among his most prized influences. By linking his work to their practices, which are typically associated with portrayals of high society, P. projects his vintage-porn source material into the firmament of classical beauty. But there is also something ominous about these paintings: P., who was born in the late 1970s, has described the period represented by the magazines as an era of gay liberation narrowly missed by members of his own generation, the first for which sex was literally connected to death. The faces in these watercolors have a diaphanous, ephemeral quality that makes them seem almost ghostly. Like ghosts, they hint at origin stories that are never fully disclosed and that viewers must intuit from traces.

This article appears under the title “Paul P.” in the February 2020 issue, pp. 93–94.

The seven oil paintings on canvas and two painted sculptures in the exhibition (all 2019) depict an emaciated, balding, androgynous man named Francis, the protagonist of Ceccaldi’s self-published comic “Human Furniture” (2017), which follows Francis as he obsessively pines after the swole Simon and has anonymous sex. The show was titled “Sex Is Work,” and indeed the paintings suggest the emotional labor that accompanies the act. In Out the Window Towards the Bavarian Castle, Francis—fully naked, with spindly, elongated limbs—floats in a pink sunset sky toward a castle, the quintessential fairy-tale ending. The scene embodies the ecstatic pinnacles of infatuation, the excitement of finding a connection with someone new. Gloomy Dinner, by contrast, evokes its disappointing lows, depicting a sullen Francis sitting alone at a table in a dark room, using a fork and knife to slice his phone in half. Despite its absurdity, this vignette captures the heartache that follows a dating app disaster or an embarrassing text—the feeling that it might be preferable to eat your phone than look at it again.

Other scenes capture the dynamics of seduction and objectification. In Red Light District, our skinny protagonist loiters by a brick wall with his pants down as a lecherous suitor—an actual dog, in business casual—lights a cigarette for him, dreamy red bokeh hexagons framing the scene. A reclining male figure drinking sloppily from a can dominates Crawling Over a Guy, his muscled, tan body evoking a landscape. Francis appears as an anthropomorphized spider crawling over his thigh, four eyes dreamily locked on the bulky crotch: the perfect representation of thirst.

While Ceccaldi’s paintings share the cartoonlike aesthetics of his comics and explore similar themes, they strip away the comics’ high drama and rapid-fire dialogue, relying on affect rather than words to offer a peek into Francis’s interior life. As a result, they capture a more complex range of emotions: deep longing, anxiety, and insecurity, but also bliss, desire, and curiosity. The scenes feel close to real contemporary experiences, even if they are represented in distinctly stylized, unreal form. Much like anime characters, Ceccaldi’s figures are relatable despite or because of their complicated and over-the-top qualities. Viewing his work is like looking in a mirror, and seeing someone flawed, sincere, and worthy of love.

This article appears under the title “Julien Ceccaldi” in the December 2019 issue, pp. 104–105.

Escobar’s exhibition at Proyectos Monclova took up the idea that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure as a means of expressing the intertwined but unequal relationship between the consumer economies of Guatemala and the United States. The floor of the gallery was littered with new sculptures from his series “Crash” (2010–): car bumpers that have been twisted and mangled in accidents and coated by the artist in chrome, their shiny surfaces contrasting with their damaged forms. The bumpers come from vehicles salvaged in the United States and imported into Guatemala. Because there are no domestic car manufacturers in Guatemala, discarded vehicles are frequently towed south through the Gulf of Mexico and refurbished for reuse once they reach Guatemala City.

Hanging on the walls were a handful of Escobar’s “Circular Compositions” (2019), in which configurations of framed works on paper display geometric compositions of black fields and white circles and semicircles. In the show, the circles loosely suggested eyes watching the viewer observe the bumpers. Like the bumpers, the works on paper incorporate material from the battered cars Guatemala imports. To create them, Escobar sneaked into parking garages around Guatemala City and placed sheets of paper underneath cars to collect the engine oil that leaks out, which he distributed across the sheets with a brush. The circular forms are portions of exposed paper that Escobar treated with a substance that repelled the oil. But the effect is only temporary: the oil will eventually seep into these areas, destroying the compositions’ hard-edge quality.

In a recent interview with the Mexican newspaper La Razón, Escobar said that while cars are often seen as a symbol of development and progress, they better represent issues of pollution and overconsumption. Escobar’s project critiques Americans who dump still-usable vehicles in order to upgrade to newer, shinier models and who remain ignorant of the afterlives of discarded goods. The cars’ recycling, however, is also detrimental to the environment, as the aging, hastily repaired vehicles lag behind current emissions standards, producing pollution for which the developing world is blamed. This reality lay beneath the pristine surface of the exhibition, which at first appeared to be an aesthetically pleasing display of glossy metal sculptures and monochromatic prints, but gradually revealed itself to be a commentary on the injustice of Central America’s absorption of first-world waste.

This article appears under the title “Dario Escobar” in the October 2019 issue, pp. 94–95.

As the press release describes, Makinson’s inspiration for these works was Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novella The Blazing World, an early precursor to science fiction. The story describes a young woman who travels through a portal in the North Pole to a utopian realm populated by talking animals and other strange creatures who accept her as their ruler. Eventually, she leads an invasion back to her home world. In a series of paintings lining the gallery’s walls, Makinson took this auspicious medieval narrative as a point of departure, constructing her own otherworldly realm of genderfluid, interspecies hybrids.

In Makinson’s paintings, giant anthropomorphized rats, birds, and serpents mingle with mythological creatures like centaurs and nymphs, as well as purple- and green-skinned humanoids with curling tails and horns. In the two largest canvases, My Fins are Sleeping and Silver Her Thorns, these creatures are arranged within indeterminate landscapes, with multicolored trees and horizontal blocks of color forming wavy grids that dissolve the distinction between foreground and background. Employing a dreamy palette of midnight blue, lilac, peach, and turquoise, Makinson plays with opacity and superimposition to heighten this disorienting lack of depth, camouflaging the figures so they appear to almost merge with the shifting terrain. The relationships among the figures Makinson depicts are similarly ambiguous: some kiss and caress, or exchange longing glances; others look suspicious or hostile. In My Fins are Sleeping, a rat clutches the shoulders of a woman as she pulls out the entrails of a floating body. Another work, Magma Rising, features a woman with catlike ears running through the landscape, as if she is trying to escape the human-headed serpent conjoined to her body.

Smaller paintings like the contemplative What A Wild Baby and the sensual diptych Crunchy Darlings are cropped tightly around individual figures or pairs, offering a more intimate view of the lush synergy between the creatures and the scenery. The former is a portrait of a nymphlike woman with a meditative expression resting on a tree, her body adopting the qualities of its surroundings: Makinson renders her polychrome skin in the exact same combination of shades as the surrounding rocks and plants. In the diptych, an olive green humanoid with gills for ears crouches in the right panel, as if hiding from view, while its tail—bearing a long-haired head attached to its tip—invades the panel on the left, circling around a headless dark green torso. Makinson weaves a sprawling world in these works: an alternate reality with redrawn boundaries, rife with re-realizations of desire, identity, and possibility.