Aria Dean

Myriam Ben Salah curates The Pain Of Others at Ghebaly Gallery, Jan 26 – Mar 3

25 January 2018

The The Pain Of Others group exhibition at Los Angeles’ Ghebaly Gallery opens January 26 and is running to March 3.

Curated by Myriam Ben Salah, the show includes work by Julien Ceccaldi, Aria Dean, Dan Finsel, Dan Herschlein, Elizabeth Jaeger, Arthur Jafa, Dala Nasser, Lydia Ourahmane, Diamond Stingily and Andra Ursuta.

Salah is a Paris-based curator and writer who has worked with the cultural programming at the Paris’ Palais de Tokyo from 2009 and recent exhibitions include I Heard You Laughing at Kunsthall Stavanger, and We Dance, We Smoke, We Kiss at Flax Foundation LA.

Visit the Ghebaly Gallery website for details.**

Lydia Ourahmane, HARAGA – ‘The Burning’ (2014) Wireless video transmission. Courtesy the artist + Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.
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Picking apart family histories + the American South in Aria Dean’s Baby is a Cool Machine at American Medium, Oct 19 – Nov 25

19 October 2017

Aria Dean is presenting solo exhibition Baby is a Cool Machine at New York’s American Medium, opening October 19 and running to November 25. 

Picking apart both her own family history and the mythologies of the American South, the Los Angeles-based artist, writer and curator presents a new series of works that becomes “an interrogation of objects-for-themselves.”

In an accompanying text written by Hanna Girma, she poses the question, “How do you begin to unburden an object bound to nothing when you too are tethered to nothingness? No body. No history. No landscape. How do you release it from the clamor of its own form?” The exhibition is an exploration into these questions, and the complexities that entangle an art object and ‘blackness.’

Visit the American Medium website for details.**

Aria Dean, ‘Dead Zone (1)’ (2017). Detail. Photo by Elon Schoenholz. Courtesy the artist + Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
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Sidestepping disorientation, blurred boundaries + ambiguity in the Syllogy group show at Veronica

10 August 2017

The Syllogy group exhibition at Seattle’s Veronica project space, opened July 22 and is running to September 16.

manuel arturo abreu, ‘Liborio nwa muelto na,’ (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Veronica, Seattle.

Curated by manuel arturo abreu, the show includes works by themselves, as well as Winslow Laroche, Adriana Ramić, Aria Dean. In a preview feature about the exhibition, AQNB contributor Minh Nguyen notes that the curatorial premise “observes a through line among the practices of the artists that play with genre disorientation, blurred boundaries, and ambiguity as a response to the politics of language,” as abreu explains, “I’m interested less in illegibility as a strategy and more in it as a dance, a sidestep.”

The object-oriented show is light and minimal, including hundreds of Ramić’s index cards that reference species classification and are lined against the wall. The press release includes a text by Gaelynn Lea, with an excerpt reading:

“We pulled the weeds out til the dawn
Nearly too tired to carry on
Someday we’ll linger in the sun.” **

The Syllogy group exhibition, curated by manuel arturo abreu, is on at Seattle’s Veronica project space, running July 22 to September 16, 2017.

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Fattened, suppressed + squeezed out in AT THIS STAGE at Château Shatto, Jun 10 – Aug 12

7 June 2017

The AT THIS STAGE group exhibition at Los Angeles’ Château Shatto opens June 10 and is running to August 12.

The show includes work by Aria DeanChris KrausBunny Rogers, Sturtevant, Martine SymsBody by BodyGardar Eide EinarssonHamishi FarahParker Ito and Jordan Wolfson

The press release includes a question posed by manuel abreau: “how can we consider the power of these images when we’re already under their influence?” (I don’t know).” The works brought together are assembled as a way to disrupt and consider “the violent intrusion of images and the assault of narrative structures on consciousness.” 

Looking at contamination, cognitive immunity, studios films and other forms of media, the “narratives that have been fattened, suppressed, squeezed out, swelled, merged, overlaid, edited, hacked” will be addressed.

Visit Château Shatto website for details.**

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Good Art Today: a review of the reviews of the Whitney Biennial

2 May 2017

The Whitney Biennial is supposed to be a definitive survey of contemporary American Art. Every two years, the curators travel the globe in order to create an exhibition that best depicts the role of art in the world today. As such, its reviews carry more weight than those of individual shows, since they speak beyond the specific works in question, and implicitly and explicitly comment on how art should be. Though any individual critique can be brushed aside as personal taste, studying a broad set allows one to establish patterns among authors and their opinions, and in so doing, discern the assumptions and value criteria that define the always-elusive question of what it means for contemporary art to be good.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape + Neotenomie, ‘With Those We Love Alive’ (2014) Hypertext. Courtesy the artists.

With this in mind, I gathered together 32 reviews of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Though the exhibition has certainly produced much more writing, I narrowed my focus  to include only those that attempt to speak in-depth about, and categorize, the show as a whole. This eliminated pieces that primarily show images, writing in the format of a ‘Top __’ list, and articles that focus on only one or two artworks. The problem then, was how to accurately assess the set as a whole. As a quantitative counterpart to close readings of each individual piece, I generated word frequency counts, which help to determine the prominent themes. The more important an artist or idea is considered to be, the more it is mentioned. The frequency counts are calculated by compiling all the text from every article, including image captions, into a plain text file and then running the file through several simple Python commands. These commands, as well as a full list of the reviews studied, can be found in the Data Appendix. Taken as a whole, the reviews present an overwhelmingly positive opinion of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and center ‘Good Art’ around three major themes: Painting, Politics, and Violence.

Though these certainly entwine, irreparably entangled, it is simplest to parse them out slowly, one at a time, beginning with painting. Mentioned the most of the three, painting’s dominant presence is one of the main narratives of the reviews. Given its prominent place in the ensuing discourse, however, it’s odd that only around 12 of the 63 featured artists are painters. Why then, has such a disproportionate amount of critical attention been devoted to them? There are two main reasons: The first is practical: many reviews were based on the press preview of the biennial, which lasted only a few hours. As Ben Davis remarked, such a short viewing time simply doesn’t allow for fully watching the videos, or engaging some of the more in-depth pieces, like Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s hypertext games. It’s hard to write convincingly about work you’ve never seen, and as a result static mediums are prioritized.

Visitors gathering in front of Jordan Wolfson’s VR ‘Real Violence; (2017). Courtesy the New Yorker.

The second reason leads to the next major theme: the political. As many reviews note, this is the first Whitney Biennial since 1997 where the preparations took place during an election year. Accordingly, the rise of U.S. President Donald Trump and his far-right populism looms large. As Chris Sharp notes in Art Agenda, ‘It’s hard to imagine a biennial being under more pressure to signify, to mean, to produce meaning, to attempt to offer some special and tangible insight into our current moment.’ This desire for signification results in a visual favoritism that reduces political action to the representational sphere. Such an emphasis leads to the dominance of figuration, especially in paintings. Henry Taylor and Dana Schutz, for example, are two of the three most mentioned artists, while conceptual artists like Cameron Rowland receive only cursory attention. Despite its sidelining in the reviews, Rowland’s ‘Public Money’ engages the political sphere more directly than any other piece in the exhibition. By having the Whitney purchase a Social Impact Bond—a financial commitment to pay for projects that are seen to have a positive social effect—Rowland creates clear economic and material change.

Through their preference for the optic and distaste for the material, the reviewers imply that the best art can do, is show and reflect, hopefully affecting the viewer and altering their subjectivity. Unfortunately, unlike the contract of a Social Impact Bond, the affective connection between art and subjectivity is not so easily established. As theorists like Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others) and David Joselit (‘Material Witness: Visual Evidence and the Case of Eric Garner’) have shown, there is rarely a clear, dependable link between visual representation and its effect on the viewer.

Cameron Rowland, ‘Public Money’ (2017) Institutional investment in Social Impact Bond. Courtesy the artist + ESSEX STREET, New York

The overdependence on representation ultimately results in violence, third theme. For the majority of writers, its depiction in figurative works, no matter how visceral, is justified if it can be understood. As Jennifer Samet makes clear in her Hyperallergic piece, for example, the use of violence is valorized as long as it contributes to ‘a unified, synthetic visual statement.’ This attitude is further revealed in the near universal dislike for Jordan Wolfson’s VR film ‘Real Violence.’ Wolfson is the second most mentioned artist, but all the commentary in the 32 reviews analysed on his work has a negative tone. It is seen as graphic and grotesque, not simply because it is violent, but because it is inexplicably so. No reason is given for the horrific scene that occurs in front of the viewer, and this makes it, for the biennial reviewers, senseless and awful.

The tendencies of the reviewers come even more into focus when ‘Real Violence’ is contrasted with Dana Schutz’s ‘Open Casket.’ The painting depicts the mutilated body of Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 after Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, falsely accused him of flirting with her. The work and its inclusion in the biennial has become a source of controversy largely because—as Hannah Black, Aria Dean, and many others have convincingly argued—Schutz, a white woman, co-opted Black pain and suffering, treating it as a raw material for her artistic practice. The discussion around the piece has even expanded beyond the borders of the art world, with Whoopi Goldberg discussing it on the daytime talk show, The View.

While ‘Real Violence’ is loathed, ‘Open Casket’ is adored. Though the work goes beyond the depiction of violence, and indeed embodies it through Schutz’s painterly re-enactment of the lynching of Emmett Till, it is nevertheless seen to be a force for good, because, as curator Mia Locks says, it has “tremendous emotional resonance.” Such a statement seems, at best, incredibly naive. And yet, the characterization of Good Art propagated by the majority of the reviewers necessitates this reading. Its complicity in a history of white supremacy becomes irrelevant, since its visual content is legible. Any ensuing or embodied violence of the work doesn’t matter, since the painting might have use as a message. It is here that the reviewers’ conception of Good Art reaches its breaking point. Violence can never be sublimated into utility.

Courtesy Whitney Biennale

Instead, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Ground of the Image, “Violence does not participate in any order of reasons, nor any set of forces oriented toward results… Violence does not transform what it assaults; rather, it takes away its form and meaning. It makes it into nothing other than a sign of its own rage, an assaulted or violated thing or being.” By creating a framework in which the best art, like ‘Open Coffin,’ is a figurative painting depicting the violence of today’s politics, the reviews of the Whitney Biennial illustrate the gap between art and the world, a space that requires a reconceptualization of art’s role if it is ever to be bridged.**

The Whitney Biennial 2017 is on at New York’s Whitney Museum, running March 17 to June 11, 2017.

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Untitled exhibition @ Club Pro LA, May 13 – Jun 3

11 May 2016

Hannah Boone, Aria Dean, and Merideth Hillbrand are presenting an untitled exhibition of work at Los Angeles’ Club Pro LA, opening May 13 and running June 3.

Organised by LA-based curator Santi Vernetti, the description of the show somewhat refreshingly tells us that “goal of the exhibition was to foster a spirit of discovery rather than to select and display works around a preconceived theme”.

Further, the press tells us that untitled exhibition “brings together three like-minded artists who share many formal and conceptual interests” and who are all likely to consider the architecture of the recently-opened gallery, “with its idiosyncratic and charming imperfections”.

LA-based Dean recently organised event Talking Heads: FAULTS, which launched the show West Hollywood at LA’s AALA Gallery in March.

See the FB event for more details.**

Aria Dean, 'gear III' (2016). Courtesy the artist
Aria Dean, ‘gear III’ (2016). Courtesy the artist
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FAULTS @ AALA Gallery, Mar 12

11 March 2016

Aria Dean is presenting Talking Heads: FAULTS to open the West Hollywood exhibition, curated by Long Island creative platform and project space Auto Body, at LA’s AALA Gallery on March 12.

The artist has invited contributors to take part in readings, presentations, video works, performances, and conversations addressing the theme of social and environmental catastrophe that the show-at-large also alludes to.

The event takes the apparently inevitable and overdue earthquake — often referred to as the ‘Big One’ — set to erupt along California’s San Andreas Fault as a starting point. Participating artists and collectives include Nicolas Bermeo & Jon Weisburst, Hannah Black, Brandon Drew Holmes and Encyclopedia Inc. who are asked to consider “faults, locations of a rubbing against each other of two masses, two bodies.”

Other contributors include  Nikita Gale, Nilo Goldfarb, Jos Howard Demme, Jasmine Nyende, Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Casey Silverstein, while the announcement warns, “There will be pdfs.”

See the FB event page for details.**

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