What is being a good host: creating a welcoming, comfortable atmosphere? connecting physically and emotionally with your guests - or giving your body up as nourishment? We, mammals walking the earth, are home to a whole range of life that varyingly helps or defeats us, in an interdependent game of growth and decay.

The human impulse is to crack open the egg, to pick at the growth, to carve into the belly of the whale, once it is pulled out of the deep. This curious intrusiveness is manifest throughout the exhibition, exploring the fine line between care and consumption, hosting and inhabiting.

‘Modo Host’ is a collaborative duo exhibition featuring works by Lila de Magalhães and Thora Dolven Balke. They share a close relationship to Brazil. Lila was born and grew up there before moving to Los Angeles where she lives and works, Thora has made roots there after a residency at Capacete in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. As such they have in common, in different ways, the condition of being simultaneously familiar and a guest.

As if you look into the microscope to find a teeming cluster of life, Lila de Magalhães creates scenarios where humans are joyfully submersed with other species, in moments of sweet surrender, the kind that erases awareness of all that was before and is to come. A range of biomorphic creatures writhe, burrow, and transcend each other's bodies and that of human figures in detailed ceramic objects and embroideries made on dyed bed sheets with fine threads. Ceramic sculptures and smaller pieces are displayed on the wall or sown onto the sheets themselves, setting up dense, fantastical narratives.

This play with human scale, both in size and time, is also central to Thora Dolven Balke’s photographic works, sculptures and video. From the choice of decidedly human made materials that promise a sinister forever into geological time, to the enlarged prints of cetacean fetuses photographed in the Sandefjord Whaling Museum in Norway, her subjects seem suspended for research, prevented from fulfilling their promise of enormity and movement, the figures slouch, slump and glide through space.

In a collaborative piece, the two artists create a display of towels – dyed, stained and folded – to support each other's works and bid a generous welcome. The exhibition's mood and colors shift from pinks, browns and greens of soil, flesh and flower, reds and iridescents of insect wings, of egg and seashells, until the sharp, white electric light is switched on to drag large and small towards it, aimlessly and incessantly circling.