#Aria Dean

[mentaltimetraveller]

Aria Dean GROUND Horizon, 2023 Dye sublimation on aluminum, wooden cleats Three Panels: 96 x 44 1/5 x 2 inches (243.8 x 112.27 x 5.1 cm) Overall Installation: 96 x 152 1/4 x 2 inches (243.8 x 386.71 x 5.1 cm)

[hydeordie]

Aria Dean

I Think We’re Alone Now / Hillside Casablanca v 1 (1.0)

2022

[slayercain]

Aria Dean: Are there terms, programs, or movements that exist that can usefully absorb Afropessimist theory into their functionings? Maybe this can also be asked this way: Can Afropessimism commingle and be combined with other theories and programs such as Marxism, Poststructuralism, Accelerationism, New Materialism, etc. without being itself polluted and totally compromised? Frank B. Wilderson III: I think that commingling is happening and it’s the kiss of death. It’s like the demonstrations in places like Portland and Minneapolis: they start off as insurrectionist projects authorized by Black grammars of suffering and end up being about all kinds of other shit, like White suffering, White exhibitionism, non-Black immigration issues, and how to make the police accountable rather than how to destroy the police. They do to Afropessimist rage what White boys in the suburbs do to hardcore rap, what White folks did to jazz. They use the intensity of Black affect to mobilize the agendas of Human desire. When Professor Patrice Douglass was in one of my seminars, as a graduate student, she asked, “How do we keep Afropessimism Black?” I was so shocked by the question that I had to pause. I said, “We can’t because we possess Afropessimism no more than we possess our flesh. To paraphrase Hortense Spillers, we are always already beings for the captor. And the way of our intellectual labors will, ultimately, go the way of our aesthetic labors, which go the way of our flesh.”

— Frank B. Wilderson III in conversation with Aria Dean

[notchainedtotrauma]

Instead, the black generic operates from an acceptance of the implicit "consent not to be a single-being" involved in black existence and aims to draw out and image this condition. The black generic forms that "middle ground between the One-All and singularity and individuality" and accommodates both the discrete and the continuous, the individual and the collective identity.

from On the black generic by Aria Dean

[peabah]

Aria Dean

FIGURE A, Friesian Mare, 2023 Polyurethane foam, paint, wood

39 x 40 x 48 inches (99 x 102 x 122

[longlistshort]

Today’s throwback is to Jenson Leonard’s solo exhibition Workflow, at Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, from the beginning of February.

From the gallery about the work-

Workflow, the first institutional solo exhibition of artist Jenson Leonard, centers on a titular film that explores the velocity and momentum of Blackness as it relates to the philosophical concept of acceleration—the notion that the only way out of capitalism is through its intensification.

In Workflow, a spectral Michael Jackson Halloween mask recites a surrealistic quarterly earnings reports. Building on a 2017 essay by artist Aria Dean titled “Notes on Blacceleration,” the short film centers on the ways in which the Black subject grapples with its commodified status within the labor market despite—or, resultant of—its own history as a commodity, stemming back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Completed during Leonard’s residency at Pioneer Works in 2021, the video utilizes uncanny humor as a mechanism to expose the shared grammars inherent in Afro-pessimism and speculative finance.

Within the exhibition, the film repeats simultaneously across two grids of computer monitors situated on ergonomic desks that flank the gallery, mimicking the workstations that can be found ubiquitously across stock trading floors and financial institutions. Sculptures modeled after computer keyboards and mouses are displayed on the desks, each rendered inoperable by concentric riffs that symbolize the erratic transformations caused by the flows of capital. The appearance of Jackson represents a transmogrification of its own; whereas many have aligned the controversial pop icon’s bleached skin and surgical procedures with Black self-hatred, Leonard positions his bodily modifications as a radical rupture from racial paradigms of being.

In Leonard’s own words, “Workflow is defined as the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion. My film seeks to disabuse notions of completion, whether it be completion of the human, the nation state, or civil society. As Dean notes, Blackness is ‘always already accelerationist’ via its incongruence with Western humanism, a wrench thrown into the locomotive gears of ‘capital and subjecthood.’ Her essay prompts us to look toward the way that the Black has been historically constructed outside of the human, as coterminous with the slave. Slavery therefore represents a kind of proto-automation, a mass forced coercion of labor, and the Blacks’ transition from object to subject calls for a reappraisal of accelerationist ideas about the (non)human entity and its revolutionary potential.”

The artist continues, “There is something about going to work—the repetition of it—that gets inscribed at an epigenetic level, as an everyday, embodied violence. From there, I thought about the panoptic workplace (open air plan, transparent yet closely surveilled, management that does not have to be in the room to be monitoring you), the fetish of efficiency (ergonomic mouse and keyboards so you can work longer), biometric data of a labor force (fingerprint and facial scans to help reduce repeat processing tasks). All of these methods to maximize profits and production can be traced back to methods worked out and perfected in the cotton and sugar cane fields hundreds of years prior.”

The text from the video was included on one of the gallery walls (image above) but I’ve included it below as well as it is definitely worth reading.

“Looking out across the macro- Panoptic eyes are everywhere. Predictive models rendered bilious, You are scalable, You contain platitudes. Clean and renewable, black from the waste management down. These are micro-credentials too big to fail. Angel investors watch over you, guide you through your webinar. You are green with infrastructure. A Nick Land acknowledgment. A multiprocession of the tiniest micropixels in all of the Anglosphere. Plan your obsolescence. Chitin’ circuitry courses through you. Wayward modulation thrumming, throbbing like an old techno spiritual. A Self driving mythology Keloid optimized. Upload speeds faster than Drapetomania. A contactless, decentralized, hands free accumulation. The base salary determines the superstructure of your beast of burden of proof of concept. Perfection is the enemy of egress. Pay the heap of flesh no mind, live in the nanosecond. Fake it till you’re skeuomorphic. You’re more than the sum of your outsourced manufacturing components. Know your neural net worth. Walk with your overhead held high. There’s never been more exciting growth in the excrement sector! It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to unsubscribe from my Onlyfans. Rather, If you can’t handle me at my Linkedin you don’t deserve me at my locked in chastity. Will you risk it all to manage my assets? Are you willing to do my taxes from the back? Tax to mouth? From the overton window, to the overton wall, to the overton sweat drop down my overton balls. Going, going… Zong.”

[sheltiechicago]

Installation view of Aria Dean, Little Island / Gut Punch, 2022, hard foam coated and painted, 85 × 32 × 32 inches.

Photo by Zeshan Ahmed

Models/Mush: Aria Dean

Investigating representational demands in sculpture, video, and writing.

Aria Dean, Work (tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie), 2021, 3-D print in polylactic acid, pigmented silicone, 66.25 × 35.75 × 35.75 inches.

Aria Dean, Forward Proxy 1.1, 2018, clay, resin, wood, 30 × 30 × 3 inches.

[gentilfarfalletta]

Aria Dean

“The Pain of Others” at Ghebaly Gallery

[salembehindbars]

Me every fall

[mentaltimetraveller]

Aria Dean, Abattoir, U.S.A.!, 2023, HD video, color, sound, 10 minutes 50 seconds. Installation view, Renaissance Society, Chicago. P

[abwwia]

Aria Dean, Installation view, King of the Loop, 2020, Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2020

[kazu-naito]

why do they hate my boy seong hwa

[notchainedtotrauma]

Aria Dean, Little Island/ Gut Punch

Hard foam coated and painted

[poisoneevy]

MC: My twin sister died. Someone killed her. Someone knows what happened. I will find out who it was no matter what it takes and what I have to sacrifice!

Every goe LI: