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Over the last two decades, Harmony Hammond has largely retreated from her curatorial and writing efforts, instead focusing on her own artistic practice. Her current solo show Accumulations at Alexander Gray presents a series of new paintings from the last three years that speak to her continued dedication to material and process.
The words we bring to art intend, at best, to translate the perceptual realm into the linguistic, anchoring sensation through definition. But, as we all know, that often doesn’t occur. The well known essay, “International Art English” by Alix Rule and David Levine skewers that premise, as does Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) nearly forty years earlier, and a decade before that Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” resisted language’s simulacrum of art. So on, down the line. And yet, words also serve to support, promote, highlight, associate, and adore the art they describe.
Aria Dean is an artist who works in multiple media. Her interest in materialist and structural film has always been an intellectual base, and in her new film Abattoir, U.S.A.! she builds upon that base in ways that expand her creative practice. Dean speaks with McKenzie Wark about the connection between her earlier film and her newest piece, the importance of collaboration, and the challenges of being an artist who is also a noted writer.