In Mother, Consumed, her second solo exhibition at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Susana Guerrero presents a collection of recently created objects that explore the symbiosis between mother and child during gestation, that precarious period when two lives are inextricably intertwined and a woman shares of her own organs, sustenance, and spirit so that a new, fully autonomous being might spring into the world. Guerrero’s works merge the traditionally feminine process of weaving with materials more commonly found in the historically male realm of industrial fabrication. A veil woven from thin cables that flows from a bloody red to a watery blue, a delicate womblike cage fashioned from thin strips of metal covered with sharp thorns from the medicinal Agave plant, and a hard ceramic sphere covered with gilded baby-bottle nipples all hint at a profound tension between warm maternal instinct and cold self-protection. Based loosely upon a Mediterranean myth of a woman who surrenders her own flesh to engender several other lives but is then parthenogenetically reborn, these works bear witness to that mysterious passage from unity to duality through which we all go at the inception of our lives.

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