XX

The titular “x” of “XX,” a group show at Latchkey Gallery, refers to the double-x chromosome to those assigned female at birth, but also unsettles that easy formulation—referring as well to the gender-neutral “x” of “Latinx.” “The six artists in this exhibition strikingly use shape, color and materials to create bold, new worlds where abstraction dismantles ordered thought,” Natalie Kates, co-founder of Latchkey, says. Amanda L. Uribe, the other co-founder, adds: “Our hope is to create ongoing opportunities while building sustainable careers for female artists so they are included in the canon of contemporary art history."

The works on view are graphic and vested in color interactions. Beverly Acha contributes a pair of paintings, one of which contains wavering bright cobalt and dusty rose lines, recalling an ocean horizon at dusk, tilted on axes. Meanwhile, Marisol Martinez’s two paintings, installed on either side of a doorway, depict floating pastel shapes superimposed over a black background. A number of works riff off of or otherwise undermine the Modernist grid. Take C. J. Chueca’s wall-mounted sculpture: though gridded, it’s made up of crumbling pink-and-tan shower tiles; Edra Soto’s “GRAFT” series, having been made as a site-specific installation for this exhibition, takes shape as, for instance, a lattice dotted with x’s and o’s like a tic-tac-toe board, which mediates the view into photographs of the artist’s home after Hurricane Maria. Ivellise Jiménez and Victoria Martinez’s sculptural works similarly play with transparency and opacity while centering viewer interactions, the latter showing a doorway, made with a combination of found textiles and hand-drawn lines and lettering. “Te quiero contar un sueño,” it reads, confidingly: “I want to tell you a dream.”