Paulina Moncada Milk Teeth

Do you know where your milk teeth are? Some bury them. Others end up in the trash. Others keep them and sometimes look at them in silence and care. Or they show it to their offspring as a relic, a treasure with no edge left. Mine are in a little red velvety box. Normally, they are the only remains of ours that we carry so close to our hearts. 

Paulina Moncada has an eye for remains. She's an artist who sculpts fleeting presences that look like the almost mythical fox-dogs of the valley in the Andes where she grew up. This time, in her first solo show at Will Shott Gallery, Moncada offers a domestic scene. Bolstered by a wooden structure, the shadow of a boy looks down from the past. He is taller than us, like a long lost childhood friend telling an important story that we now forgot. His gaze leads us into a still life made of dental plaster, replicas of the material intimity of the artist: a ceramic fold with the coquettishness of the slopes of the Andes; two of her wisdom teeth; a footstool and, on it, two dissected eastern tiger swallowtails.

It's easy and cheap to buy taxidermized butterflies. Many come already framed or propped up in a display stand. They are destined to become artworks, exhibition pieces in collections all over the globe. This silent kingdom of resin of course extends to almost all the animals we know: owls and tigers, praying mantises and manatees. Hundreds of thousands of corpses inhabit museums and living rooms in phantasmagoric discretion. There we can observe them with care, in perpetual stillness. And believe, for a while, that we know them. 

We don't know what fate brought these specimens to rest here, in New York, on this altar of dental plaster. We don't know the life of these animals but in front of our human eyes, they become themselves: flying over a river, sheltered in a flower from the rain's dew, eating remains from the humid land. It stops being just one to become all butterflies lost in the spiral of time. 

Like a folded butterfly in a piece of paper, images crumble between our fingers: It's hard to cling on to something in our era of mirages. Moncada turns her gaze back to what lies nestled in the creases of reality and has the courage to paint what she sees and what we prefer to forget: that the world was different, like the teeth in your mouth. 

Installation

 

Works

PAULINA MONCADA
Caducifolia, 2026
Reclaimed wood, metal, and oil on canvas
Variable dimensions