Common Skin Fantasy (Alejandra Moros & Alicia Bilbao), KDR
Common Skin Fantasy
Alejandra Moros & Alicia Bilbao
September 5th - October 10th, 2026
KDR is pleased to present Common Skin Fantasy, a two-person exhibition by Miami-based artists Alicia Bilbao and Alejandra Moros.
Common Skin Fantasy marks the first time the two artists’ works have existed in dialogue, creating an environment where materials, conceptual references, and audience projections expand in uncanny ways that reflect the scope of both practices.
Born in Heidelberg, Germany, and moving to Miami in her teenage years, Bilbao’s sculpture-based practice exists somewhere between the histories of fictional myths and the otherwise brutal psychological revelations that reality inevitably trails. Born in Miami, Moros’s multidisciplinary practice, taking shape primarily through painting within this exhibition, explores transformation, adaptation across psychological, ecological, and collective systems, and the mirrored possibilities of fiction.
Introducing their works through the unusually apt reflections on the psychoanalytic concept by Didier Anzieu, Common Skin Fantasy theorizes the imaginary state of an infant whose skin-to-skin contact through daily care leads them to feel no physical or psychological boundary between themselves and their mother, a fantasy that will eventually be disrupted by inevitable growth and an awareness of their own skin. This symbiotic dissolving of boundaries between maker and child resonates with Moros’s and Bilbao’s practices, and oddly enough, even more so when their work is placed in curatorial kinship.
Where Moros may spend years collecting visual references for her paintings, ranging from Victorian-era prosthetics and the shedding of reptilian skins to the pollination processes of orchids, Bilbao, who works as a scientific laboratory researcher by day, intimately creates sculptural figures from artificial and organic materials, ranging from epoxy clay and resin to tufts of her own hair and animal pelts. The fragmented bodies and small faces she renders tend to evoke the illusion of real psychological discrepancies possible within her figures. While Bilbao reinforces the strange familiarity of the figure through rendering an isolated stance, a blank human glare, the essence of a simple gesture held in suspension, Moros dissociates us from our own cognitive reserves, creating spectral remnants of something that perhaps once belonged to the organic world.
Within the framework of the exhibition title, the question almost begs itself: which of the two is the mother, and which is the child? More conclusively, however, it feels as though the answer lies somewhere within the tension of each artist’s relationship to the molding of their own fictional and fantastical environments. The work, made by two devoted and nimble hands spending hours painting the softness of light reflecting off fleshy gums or sanding the delicate and tenuous details of a clay doll’s fingertips, seems to symbolize the infant itself: inevitably adapting, progressively taking up more room, and vulnerably rendering its own skin, open to interpretation and consciousness. Meanwhile, its makers, Moros and Bilbao, have already soaked up some of the realities of the world, consequently creating tender dystopias that, too, allow them to temporarily lose the boundaries of where their skin begins and ends.
–Words by Catherine Mary Camargo.
Additional text by Catherine Mary Camargo
Common Skin Fantasy 1 – for Alejandra and Alicia
Small, fragile bones, vertebrae-like, floating like synchronized swimmers or dancing
dead flower petals on the surface of the bay.
Long, square, hot pink-tipped nails bobbing through the dark waters to surgically
retrieve them piece by piece, to give to the woman, the sister, whom she just met
yesterday.
Split ends, chopped and gathered by stubborn, nimble fingers.
A woman who often feels still like a girl, with a capacity for smoke in her chamber,
raised where sweltering lungs are innate as the impulse to retrieve a note fallen from
a stranger’s pocket.
She guards what lingers/ People, small things, bones, papers, breath, trails of smoke.
I want to read the note resting in the palm of her hand.
On it are directions to peer into that small slit of wood, where the early-morning
streaks of light radiate through and gently blind you, christen you, and make a
promise to you.
The light source is not a place, nor a feeling, nor a woman with jet black or bleach
blonde hair, not even her alluring residue remains.
Their scent untrackable,/
her complexities naturally intact without compromise and internal castration.
Broken, split, hollow; where all of the light fits right in.
Her dexterous fingers have been modified to maternally fixate on each isolated dog
hair she glues back onto her proxy child's head.
Pink rosy cheeks representing nothing except perhaps the juncture of a pure slate and
a callousness yet to be elaborated by experience.
She’s a romantic.
Her tooth will grow back overnight.
Your projections are devoid of power.
The first man she humbled.
A bundle of nectar.
A dissociating figure.
Her first cigarette.
A subdued heart drawn in the sand.
30 birds in a wardrobe, longing for permission to fly.
Her instincts only partially regulated, still.
Step-by-step instructions to flee from this fucking skin, all in the cursive of a
stray note from SW First Ave.
This skin has yet to weather in some corners, some suppleness she wishes to keep, and
other spots she wants to sprout a second, harder, leathered layer.
Where penetration is no longer an option unless she first burns the seams off herself.
A small yellow light underneath the black swamp water,with a prophetical glow,and her
swaying reflection of doe eyes looking back at her with a shaking stillness.
One continuous skin, between herself, her future and past child, the one she lost or
might, and the girl whose note she kept.
Their siren call was only ever to each other.