Paloma Izquierdo: Carrier — Paloma Izquierdo

HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Carrier, a site-specific installation by New York-based artist Paloma Izquierdo, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery.

Paloma Izquierdo is an artist who builds her own systems. Her installations reconstruct the infrastructures of everyday life—the kind you hardly notice because they’re designed to disappear into routine and peripheral vision. Handrails that guide us down the stairs or window frames designed to maximize airflow: everyday architectures that recede into habit and become objects of automatic trust. For Paloma, these mundane forms are primed to hold secrets—what better place to hide than in plain sight?

In our everyday lives, we rely on systems we cannot fully see, trusting messages as they arrive. Paloma questions the invisibility of these systems and the trust it produces—where visibility ends, suspicion begins. At HESSE FLATOW, Paloma presents her newest work Carrier, reviving the nearly archaic pneumatic tube system to examine invisible conduits that quietly organize communication. Having grown up between the US and Cuba, Paloma is influenced by the improvised infrastructures on the island—the necessary and self-organized strategies in the face of politically induced scarcity and crises. This experience shapes her understanding of infrastructure as something that can always be repurposed and never as neutral as it might appear. In the gallery, she creates a site-specific replica of pneumatic tubes. Reconstructing these invisible and archaic architectures, she transforms the unseen into something tactile and redirectable.

Pneumatic tubes were introduced across New York City as a mail delivery system at the turn of the twentieth century. Born from a charming time of industrial optimism, these tubes promised fast, frictionless mail transport. Still buried deep under the asphalt and within the walls of buildings, the system occasionally surfaced, like veins that turn blue beneath the layers of our flesh. Paloma revives their fantasy of instantaneous communication to examine the trust placed in unseen apparatuses, drawing parallels to a logic that persists today: efficiency through invisibility. Today, fiber-optic cables entangle us at different scales—blending into our homes, surface-mounted around our door frames, or lying out of sight on the ocean floor off the shores of Paloma’s hometown of Miami. These infrastructures carry more than information; they carry habit, memory, feeling, and the potential for interference.

Carrier is an exercise in reclaiming agency over systems designed to disappear. Paloma transforms these apparatuses into objects that can once again be touched, diverted, and interrupted. Glass canisters circulate from one side of the room to the other, exposing what is buried within architecture. Yet instead of carrying letters and dispatches, each canister holds residues from our daily lives—traces of our interests and routines that could be pieced together into evidence of our movements. The contents are not random; together, they are a message in a bottle.