Patricia Domínguez’s first solo exhibition at The Ryder Projects, Lactómeda , takes its name from a term describing the collision of two galaxies: the Milky Way and Andromeda. Domínguez’s practice centers on vocabularies that describe entanglements and interconnections between matter and species. In exploring these issues, her work concentrates on that which brings together quantum physics, ethnobotany, and spiritual cosmologies. These sources are not treated separately, but are woven together throughout her practice.
The concept of “portal” frames the intention behind bringing together video, photographic, sculptural, and pictorial works in one space: Lactómeda . In theoretical physics, portals are attempts to understand how different worlds interact with each other to form the space we live in. This is a recurring theme in the language of physical sciences, describing entanglement, connection, and the transport from one world to another. Elevators, phone screens, and airplanes—metaphors for portals—recur throughout Domínguez’s oeuvre. The exhibition design, which presents a balance of blue and green in an immersive light-altering space, takes the form of a portal.
Between 2021 and 2024, Patricia Domínguez participated in an artistic residency at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, at the astronomical facilities of the ESO, and at the ALMA and La Silla observatories in the Atacama Desert, Chile. The pieces exhibited in this show relate to the artist’s research in these contexts, specifically exploring species entanglement through the lens of quantum physics.
Quantum entanglement is a counterintuitive phenomenon in which a change in one particle instantly affects another, regardless of the distance between them. Two particles can share states and communicate, even when separated by billions of light-years. Tres Lunas Más Abajo and the analog photographs taken inside CERN tell an emotional story of entanglement, as a protagonist searches for their lost particle with the help of a robotic bird, which also appears (twice) within this exhibition space. The analog photographs capture the beating heart of contemporary technological mechanisms at CERN through the older technological medium of analog photography. Through this, the artist establishes a dialogue between the old and the new in science, where past and future devices unite in a luminous dance of relativity.
At the ALMA radio telescope and the ESO astronomical facilities, Domínguez used enormous telescopes to look outward, observing stars and galaxies. These conceptions of interstellar universes, and the theories of technological interconnection that illustrate their presence, can be read through Pupilas Geométricas. In these watercolors, we enter the artist’s dream of a flight from Switzerland to Chile. The travelers have rectangular pupils that transform into inter-somatic and surreal portals toward an alternative consciousness.
Matrix Vegetal is a video piece developed in the Madre de Dios Forest in Peru, created between Domínguez’s research periods at CERN, with a focus on expanding her understanding of the invisible through learnings in the vegetal and spiritual universe. Like entangled particles, Domínguez’s work sees resonances between quantum physics, spirituality, and theories of interspecies interconnection. Through video art, sculpture, photography, and watercolor, technology and science are explored and communicated outside of taxonomic rationalism, and instead, through emotion, spirituality, and, at times, humor. Her works thus invite us to reflect on the colonial and patriarchal histories of how Western science is communicated and represented in language and visual culture.
Patricia Domínguez’s pieces are universes shaped through attunement and intention toward dissolving the binaries associated with Cartesian rationality. Her worlds are those where the lines that separate empiricism from intuition are decentralized. Thus, within Lactómeda, quantum physics is not something to be fully understood or solved, but something to be felt and inhabited.
