Parent Company is pleased to announce Do Not Be Afraid, a solo exhibition by Leonardo Madriz consisting of illuminated sculptures. Balanced yet precarious, the sculptures hang like columns by a system of knotted ropes that bind together found objects, handblown glass, and sculptural light elements. Through titles, Madriz evokes the role of sentinels, meaning "one who stands guard or keeps watch." Comprised of found materials with dense iconography, the sentinels metaphorically unspool larger narratives around nationhood, violence, migration, and refuge.

Rope holds the root logic, connecting everything else in relation. It is an ancient technology with a lineage of spiritual function, carried here through knot names and connection points of poetic resonance. In Sentinel Adorned in the Leaver's Wake, blood knots join red electrical wire to rope, suggesting both lineage and artery. Illuminated casts of street ephemera and a plastic water bottle dangle from handcuff knots, typically used as hoists in search and rescue. In Sentinel of Tenders, arborist rope runs through a pulley system connected on either end by perfection loop knots.

From rope's root logic emerges the visual syntax of found objects left legible. In Down is the New Up, barbed wire and chain join the illuminated hem of an American flag made in Vietnam, hanging collar-like. A counterfeit Rolex purchased on Canal Street dangles from its hem with seductive glare, while an illuminated doorway threshold intertwines in möbius-strip fashion. Beneath it, a giant water jug refracts light in the shape of a target. Across other works, objects such as IV bags, a meat hook, a brass urn, and a shock absorber stack new meanings with their histories intact.

Against all this legibility, light serves as counterpoint. It functions as animating principle offering the potential for transcendence. Fabric caught on barbed wire takes on a warm candlelight glow. A picket fence becomes a beaming arrow. Surgical masks encase a bright light, and a cast iPhone refracts hot red across glass in a chain-link cage.

Bound, indexical, animate—the work gestures toward art's earliest function as ritual objects of mythos and protection. This is most present in Sentinel of Lacrimosa Guerrero, a central gateway and collapsing portal installed toward the back of the gallery. Lacrimosa (Latin for "weeping”)  refers to a section of the Catholic Requiem Mass, most famously composed by Mozart in his final, unfinished Requiem in D minor. The piece contains credit card fragments, cast human teeth, a wrecked hubcap, hunting knives, smashed visors, thermal safety blankets, metal flowers, a decommissioned fire hose, and a microphone.

At the gallery entrance, a photograph taken at night shows two buildings completely overtaken by vines. Everything built, everything bound, left in the context of a universe much larger and longer than us.