Diana Sofía Lozano
Under, Cover
Opening April 23, 2026 – June 20, 2026
PROXYCO Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002
PROXYCO Gallery is pleased to present Under, Cover, a solo exhibition by Diana Sofía Lozano. The artworks in Under, Cover speculate on the relationships between botanical forms and clouds of fumigation, protection, disruption, and counterinsurgency. What is indulgent and beautiful on the surface brings systems of surveillance and (self-)perception into stark relief.
At the threshold of the exhibition, viewers are confronted with a video montage of news footage reporting on the aerial fumigation of coca—primarily in Colombia—an ongoing result of US military intervention in South America implemented by the war on drugs. From skies pierced by ominous aircrafts, to clouds of herbicides, to teargas and smoke bombs thrown at Indigenous agrarian protestors, the moving images and distorted audio remind viewers that airpower is inextricable from military technology, dispossession, and visuality. These atmospheric gestures permeate the gallery with the militarized affect of anticipation and anxiety.
Staging moments of intersubjectivity between the viewer, flower, cloud, and mirror, Lozano’s sculptures reveal the constructedness of botanical meaning and aestheticization. Such tensions divulge the politics of legibility and desirability that render orchids beautiful and coca criminal. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory suggesting that “the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world,” the exhibition presents an abortive mirror stage: mimicking and foregrounding the conditions of visibility for the flower at the expense of rupturing the viewer’s own sense of self.
Lozano’s wallworks feature hybrid cloud/flower outgrowths atop mirrored surfaces. Colorful orchids UV-printed on mirrors present an idealized image of the tropics, yet their obstruction of the gaze disturbs viewers’ desires to see themselves through this illusory moment of misrecognition. Images of cloudy skies printed on other mirrored surfaces offer an inverted technology of visibility. Though clouds have temporarily thwarted efforts at aerial surveillance, here they have become permanently reflective of these systems of capture, providing a clearing to perceive the “face” of sculpted flowers covered in remote sensing maps for coca detection. In collages unceremoniously nailed to the walls—as if ephemeral configurations of the stratosphere—panels of handpainted clouds provide brief opacities between the layered transparencies replicating militaristic archives. A redacted document lays bare the informational illegibilities that script our own perceptions and expectations of trust and culpability.
Whether under cover of camouflage or confidentiality, canopy or clouds, Under, Cover destabilizes the presumed authenticity of documentation and the categorization of il/legal landscapes. Despite Lozano’s reliance on ecological allegories, the artificial and mythologized worlds in this exhibition demonstrate how what we perceive to be “natural” has actually become naturalized through processes of anthropocentric touch, observation, and systematization.
– Jacinda S. Tran, PhD