Gut Pinch
ARIA DEAN
THE SUNROOM
DECEMBER 13, 2017 - FEBRUARY 17, 2016
BY HALLIE MCNEILL
FEBRUARY 14, 2018
RESPONSE > RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
For Aria Dean’s recent solo show “Gut Pinch” at The Sunroom in Richmond, Virginia, the artist included the video A River Called Death (2017), shown earlier last year at American Medium, and two new works: a bale of cotton tied up with a seductive red ribbon (Untitled (Bale #1)), and Cipher 2, a standing mirror positioned across the room from a backwards inscribed wall text which the mirror reflects and deciphers.
Tidiness reigns over the physical objects; everything is bound or bounded. The sharp sides of the 4K monitor seem to hold back A River Called Death’s shots of endless cosmos and the equally immeasurable muck of the muddy brown Yazoo River. The river is one that Dean sees through an estranged distance, thus giving her the space to explore it as both an object (a river, whose name, Yazoo, literally translates to death) and a mythos entrenched in family history. A figure - the ghost of Dean’s grandfather, who left the part of Mississippi where the Yazoo River runs - wades in and out of the narrative. The river appears in the video as a background or backdrop to a loose narrative that captions the screen. Thus the Yazoo functions as a kind of terrible screensaver - an antithesis to the too gorgeous mountain range photos licensed that Macs default to - as well as an overwhelming plenitude that exists in opposition to the void of deep space that crops up between shots. Whatever plenitude it might represent is, at best, an ironic one. One of the video’s themes is silence: a muffling bleep overrides the ambient sounds of the video, but also the silence of erasure, of nonexistence. Like death itself, the river's presence is ultimately an absence.
The backwards wall text in Cipher 2 reads “the bondage of appearance,” a reference to an Ad Reinhardt quote about the need for artists to liberate themselves from the aforementioned. This is an aching pursuit; for each of us, what is there but what we see in the mirror? What makes Dean’s use of the quote so powerful is the fact that words are not hers, but a white male’s. By borrowing his words and making them legible through a proxy, she creates a loop in which the viewer is excluded from the conversation, left standing on the sidelines as a disempowered observer barred from an ontological quest that has, historically, disregarded so many.
The sumptuous red ribbon around Untitled (Bale #1) is the piece’s period and its question mark. This is held together. How is this held together? How do we negotiate the messiness of this object which belongs to the Southern past, a racist past, but also to banal, daily life, albeit one soaked in these pasts? Do we admire it for its material, formalist, even exotic qualities (if only exotic by today’s urban and suburban standards)? Or do we take it as a symbol of the evil Antebellum world, another kind of cipher? The tension a privileged viewer feels when they sense themselves implicated in these systems of oppression when confronted with an object like Untitled (Bale #1) is what “Gut Pinch” exposes. According to an interview last fall with Nat Marcus, at the moment Dean seems to be more excited about making such work than writing about it. Lucky for us - we have a lot to look forward to.
The Sunroom, Exterior image, 2017
"Gut Pinch", Installation View
A River Called Death (still), 2017, Video, 7:33 minutes
"Gut Pinch", Installation View
Cipher (2), 2017, Mirror, vinyl and wall text
Untitled (Bale #1), 2017, Cotton, copper wire and ribbon, 17 x 28 x 21 inches
Hallie McNeill is a writer and artist working primarily with writing, installation, and sculpture. She received her MFA from the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives and works in New York.
halliemcneill.com
The Sunroom was founded in 2016 by McKeever Donovan & Ellie Hunter and is currently based in Richmond, VA. It functions as a platform for art exhibitions, lectures and readings, and small edition publishing.
thesunroom.xyz
All images courtesy The Sunroom.
RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.