Suspended in the Iris is a site-specific installation by artist Diana Sofia Lozano. Lozano braids steel, wool, and clay into an undefinable botanical chimera that eludes clarity and recognition. Located in the street-level window display of Home Gallery, her installation invites passersby to question their impulses to dissect, classify, and exoticize the spectacle, in order to interrogate a Western desire to dominate our surroundings as a way to make sense of the world around us.

Suspended in the Iris wields mirrors to not only capture the dynamism of its surrounding urban ecology, but also to flip the gaze back onto the viewer captured within its fragmented reflections. Lured by the installation’s floral epicenter, passersby catch themselves reflected in its habitat as they become a spectacle absorbed into the language of Lozano’s objects, creating an interspecies perspective that decenters our own while blurring the boundaries of viewership. Further inspection of the mirrors reveals the reflection of an otherwise secret photograph in a moment of clandestine intimacy. By disrupting mechanics of vision, Lozano deprioritizes visuality as empirical and objective information in order to present a more haptic and embodied mode of relationality.

“The development of botany–as the methodical examination, documentation, and classification of vegetal matter–abetted imperial expansion, colonial extraction, and subsequent subjugation of racialized peoples,” says Lozano. “Plants’ mercurial and ambiguous position within a hierarchy of animacy renders this lens of interrogation lush with interpretations in-between subjectivities. The aesthetics of hybridity, fantasy, and ornamentation thus illuminate the transgressive potential of that which is unclassifiable: that which moves fluidly through diverse microclimates, as well as that considered to be ‘invasive’ or ‘monstrous’ botanical anomalies.”

By connecting the exoticization and classification of plants to systems of gender, sexuality, and race, Lozano accounts for how taxonomy fails to communicate the complexities and interconnectivities of the world in which we live. As a storefront window in the Lower East Side, the botanical installation does not aim to juxtapose the bifurcation of “city” and “nature”; rather, it destabilizes the “naturalization” of species and spectatorship. Its entanglement of self and other ruptures the illusion of a sovereign individual subject come to capture, classify, and exotify the “other.” Through the use of magnification–of subject, viewer, and phenomena–Lozano creates a participatory moment of suspension that invites us to assess, and uproot, our impulses and challenges our expectations.

 Alongside the exhibition, ACOMPI published a limited-edition, signed and numbered risograph print by Diana Sofia Lozano, as well as an artist-designed shirt.