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Aria Dean — P, sideways, halfway season
Aria Dean

P, sideways, halfway season

2022

"P, sideways, halfway season" presents a lacquered red wooden form modeled on the knocking pen, a device developed in the twentieth century for the industrial slaughter of cattle. Dean has engraved its surface with a digitally altered illustration sourced from Sigfried Giedeon's 1948 text "Mechanization Takes Command," a foundational study of how industrialization reshaped modern life, including detailed analysis of the abattoir and its systematized management of death. The pairing of object and image is precise and deliberate, drawing the viewer into a layered confrontation with the visual and material language of mechanized killing. Dean works consistently at the intersection of Minimalism's formal vocabulary and its ideological blind spots, using clean geometries and restrained surfaces as containers for histories that Minimalism itself often suppressed or ignored. Here, the red lacquer gives the boxlike form an almost ceremonial quality, while the engraved illustration reintroduces the brutal specificity of what the shape references. The work situates industrialization, modernity, and race within the same analytical frame, asking how systems for managing bodies, whether animal or human, are designed, aestheticized, and naturalized over time. Dean holds a bachelor's degree in studio art from Oberlin College and has worked as assistant curator of net art and digital culture at Rhizome, alongside an active publishing practice spanning Artforum, e-flux, Texte zur Kunst, and Art in America. Her exhibition history includes Greene Naftali, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Schinkel Pavillon, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Hammer Museum's "Made in L.A. 2020: A Version." This work, offered through the Walker Art Center Benefit Auction, represents a compelling entry point into a practice that has gained significant critical attention across both artistic and scholarly contexts.

Medium
Red-lacquered wood, silicon rubber
Overall

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About this work

Aria Dean, P, sideways, halfway season, 2022

"P, sideways, halfway season" presents a lacquered red wooden form modeled on the knocking pen, a device developed in the twentieth century for the industrial slaughter of cattle. Dean has engraved its surface with a digitally altered illustration sourced from Sigfried Giedeon's 1948 text "Mechanization Takes Command," a foundational study of how industrialization reshaped modern life, including detailed analysis of the abattoir and its systematized management of death. The pairing of object and image is precise and deliberate, drawing the viewer into a layered confrontation with the visual and material language of mechanized killing. Dean works consistently at the intersection of Minimalism's formal vocabulary and its ideological blind spots, using clean geometries and restrained surfaces as containers for histories that Minimalism itself often suppressed or ignored. Here, the red lacquer gives the boxlike form an almost ceremonial quality, while the engraved illustration reintroduces the brutal specificity of what the shape references. The work situates industrialization, modernity, and race within the same analytical frame, asking how systems for managing bodies, whether animal or human, are designed, aestheticized, and naturalized over time. Dean holds a bachelor's degree in studio art from Oberlin College and has worked as assistant curator of net art and digital culture at Rhizome, alongside an active publishing practice spanning Artforum, e-flux, Texte zur Kunst, and Art in America. Her exhibition history includes Greene Naftali, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Schinkel Pavillon, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Hammer Museum's "Made in L.A. 2020: A Version." This work, offered through the Walker Art Center Benefit Auction, represents a compelling entry point into a practice that has gained significant critical attention across both artistic and scholarly contexts.

Medium
Red-lacquered wood, silicon rubber
Dimensions
overall: 44.5 x 67.9 x 5.1 cm
Year
2022
Seen at
Walker Art Center Benefit Auction

Related themes

Mohn Art Collective

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