Crusting: Cara Rae Joven and Lauren Goldenberg Longoria

Crusting evokes the moment when fluid meets air, when something begins to settle, rupture, or transform. It is a skin, a residue, a scar. In this two-person exhibition, artists Cara Rae Joven and Lauren Goldenberg Longoria explore the porous boundaries between surface and weight, body and land, beauty and abjection. Across sculpture, performance, video, and paper-based works, the artists investigate how histories are carried, how forms are shaped by time, and how matter remembers.

Cara Rae Joven’s practice traces the invisible threads that tether body and landscape. Working across sculpture, performance, and video, she engages with gravitational forces, both literal and historical, that act on materials and memory. In her How To/You Can: video series, she performs subtle, persistent gestures in landscapes marked by cultural trauma, offering tender interventions into spaces of past violence. Her Future Tools sculptures imagine speculative, non-dominant technologies: objects of connection and care, forged in anticipation of uncertain futures.

Lauren Goldenberg Longoria’s works emerge from an intimate ritual of transformation: sifting, soaking, and compressing discarded personal objects into densely layered paper forms. Her process echoes bodily rhythms—sweating, bleeding, slicing—and evokes the sensorial charge of memory lodged deep within material. These works are both architectural and intimate, saturated with pigment and pressure. They hold a delicate tension between the abject and the transcendent, revealing how grossness and beauty coexist within the material memory of the body.

Through a shared commitment to embodied inquiry, Joven and Goldenberg Longoria create forms shaped by tactile chemistries and bodily processes. Their surfaces blister, flake, and sag—echoing the earth’s crust, formed through collision and worn down over time. Refusing mastery over material, both artists embrace gravity, erosion, and entropy as collaborators. Together, the artists open up a space where survival, tenderness, and transformation coexist. Their exhibition Crusting asks viewers to consider: What remains when something breaks down? How does the past live on in the present—and what might be the essential tools for the worlds we are building now?