In a different era, Fharid LaTorre’s hand carved wood and metal sculptures and Jamieson Pearl’s oil on linen paintings might have coexisted in a spiritual context. Today, instead of a chapel, Queue Gallery’s new location above Tunnel Projects presents these ancient-feeling mediums in a cement storefront. In this cold space Miami-born LaTorre’s Cronenberg-esque timber organs made with scavenged metal meet LA-based Pearl’s glitch-blocked saints of the day—screenshots from LiveLeak pornos and portraits of women famed and shamed by the internet. Pearl’s niche microcelebrities appear like marionettes suspended by the same harsh silver armatures that so tenderly hold LaTorre’s carvings. This show’s dueling explorations of distortion connect Miami and Los Angeles, two cities known for plastic surgery and online influencer culture.
Both bodies of work gesture at transformation as a modern state of being. LaTorre’s work recalls the surgical nature of the contemporary body; suspended from the ceiling, the leg-like form of showing slivers & taking off skin for sake of dopamine layer of diophantine equations (2026) appears to have been broken and re-set over and over again in its metal contraption, seemingly for aesthetic purposes. The knotted burl wood guides LaTorre’s carving to reveal prolonged and profound stress. The artist’s natural shapes emphasize the life of the material before it reached his studio, a part of a tree, which is a smaller part of a larger ecosystem. Removed from that context and held exactly by clinical external fixators, the work feels reminiscent of procedures meant to freeze the body in an ideal state.
While LaTorre’s work balances a sense of cold alienness with the warm tones of something born from this earth, Pearl’s models look like flesh that was carved from those bones, their gazes accusatory when they do meet the viewer. The images are broken down into the tiny squares of a glitching screen, distorted on canvas. Pearl painted the work free handed without intervention, and the imperfections of the warping blocks become more apparent on closer inspection, the artist’s hand evident in the choice of screenshot achingly recreated. Pearl’s heroines, whether familiar to the viewer’s algorithm or not, are models whose brief moments of internet infamy have now been “saved” forever IRL.
Rising from the floor to recall a womb, the petrified wood and wax LaTorre refers to as a pissing imitator… (2024) unfurls like a hybridized flower, its anatomy suspended in hardware; another set of sculptures across the room presented on a stainless steel counter form twin images in cast aluminum and raw elder burl, appearing like something to be surgically implanted or just removed from an unseen patient. The women in Pearl’s paintings, too, are human forms mediated through their capture on the metal and glass gaze of a phone or computer screen, removed of their personhood by the churn of a hungry device. Whether represented in wood or oil paint, these are bodies at their most consumable, held in stasis by the cold metal of inhuman structures. Taken together, the artist’s works become a conversation about the modern creatures ensnared in their devices, modified physically and mentally to accommodate the weight of the machine’s constant presence.
Evidence of Evolution is on view at QUEUE Gallery through May 31, 2026.
