Digesting Scroll—Feb, March, April, 2020

Argote created Digesting Scroll—Feb, March, April during the first months of city and state shelter-in-place orders issued in response to the rapidly escalating Covid-19 pandemic. To mark the long and lonely hours spent in her LA studio, the artist turned to the protein bars she had purchased in bulk to sustain herself. She pressed them like printing blocks onto sheets of paper and traced the resulting oily blots in crayon, yielding a kind of mysterious calendar or chronometer. Despite Argote’s “capture” of the blots at the precise moment of her drawing, the exchange between the protein bars and paper continues to unfold. The oils seep beyond the crayon-defined boundaries, defying their gesture toward stasis and attesting to the passage of time by way of barely perceptible yet perpetual change.