Eleanna Cadalso “Nuevxs Cuerpxs”
Venezuelan-American multidisciplinary artist Eleanna Cadalsø presents Nuevxs Cuerpxs, a new exhibition that examines the body as a platform for cultural expression, adornment, technology, and material history. Presented in dialogue with the energy of New York Fashion Week, the exhibition brings Cadalsø’s sculptural practice into conversation with contemporary fashion and the expanded field of wearable forms.
Six years after one of the most socially isolating periods in global history, Nuevxs Cuerpxs considers how our relationship to the body has shifted. Cadalsø responds through a series of humanoid adornments that blur the boundaries between sculpture, fashion, industrial design, and the body, proposing forms that evoke hybrid bodies and alternative modes of self-presentation.
The exhibition draws from the visual language of pre-Columbian adornment while translating its forms through contemporary materials and processes. Cadalsø’s work brings together seemingly distant temporalities, connecting histories of adornment with experiences of grief, self-care, consumption, and contemporary cultural production.
At the center of the exhibition is Cadalsø’s ongoing exploration of latex. Informed by her background in industrial design, this second iteration of the artist’s latex practice considers the material beyond its industrial application, tracing its complicated relationship to Latin American colonial history. The work invokes the histories of rubber extraction, displacement, and exploitation across the Amazonian region, placing questions of materiality, labor, consumption, and the body within the same field of inquiry.
Cadalsø’s broader practice is informed by independent circles of cultural production and personal research into cyborg aesthetics. In Nuevxs Cuerpxs, these interests converge through objects that function simultaneously as adornment, sculpture, and speculative extensions of the body.
For curator Dulcina Abreu, the exhibition situates Cadalsø’s work within an expanded understanding of sculpture, where the body itself becomes a site through which cultural histories, materials, technologies, and imagined futures can be negotiated.
“Nuevxs Cuerpxs asks us to consider not simply as a form of identity-building and material memory,” says Abreu. “These objects inhabit the space between the body and the manufactured world, allowing us to think about how we construct ourselves through the materials, histories, and technologies that surround us.”
At the intersection of art, fashion, industrial design, and material culture, Nuevxs Cuerpxs proposes adornment as a contemporary sculptural language, one that can carry histories while imagining bodies that have yet to exist.
