At the center of Esther Gatón’s “Emil Lime” exhibit is a life-size boat, suspended by metal cables from a hole in the ceiling. _The 2023 sculpture, which shares the exhibition’s palindromic title, consists of bound bamboo reeds woven through a large brushed metal shell and decorated with paint, glitter, stickers and rubber animals. A Technicolor strip of “vegan bioplastic,” burned with a lighter and dyed with natural pigments reminiscent of moss, mold, lichen, and fungus, hangs from the midsection like a downed and tattered mainsail. Hidden in the ceiling, a small engine periodically makes the ship wobble and shake, as if it were running aground.
The wall text compares the motion of the boat to that of a mechanical bull, a gondola, or a pendulum, but none of these quite match the soft, sputtering pathos of Gatón’s motorized canoe. Its movement looks more like a bug or a video rendering error. This deliberate confusion of the real and the virtual is extended by a series of four untitled collages (all from 2022) hung on the surrounding walls. These small, chaotic compositions mix and blur photographic and digitally rendered material (street snapshots, watermarked web images, in-progress photos from Gatón’s studio) to form primordial studies of texture: glistening glass, seeping mud, magma bubbling.
With its infused pastel water world aesthetic, and the attendant implications of a makeshift ark, “Emil Lime” drifts into a sense of impending apocalypse. But there’s a playfulness and unironic curiosity about Gatón’s work that seems intent on turning stray trash into a life raft, no matter how rambling or unfit for flooding.
