Aggregate Space Gallery
proudly presents "Blue-Barbar-Braid: Forms at Rest / Forms in Resistance"
A Solo Show Featuring Artwork by Izidora Leber LETHE, Curated by Aaron Wilder

Izidora Leber LETHE, The Unknown pan-temporal survivors of the Empire, 2018, Digital montage of multiple details from Tracings, Ceramics

August 24-September 22, 2018

Opening Reception: Friday August 24, 6:00pm-10:00pm

Oakland First Friday: Friday September 7, 5:00pm-8:00pm

Second Saturday Artist Talk: Saturday September 8, 11:00am-1:00pm

Aggregate Space Gallery

801 West Grand Avenue

Oakland, CA 94607

Blue-Barbar-Braid is a semi-fictional solo exhibition by Izidora Leber LETHE paying homage to resistant forms throughout the centuries. By mobilizing the ancient Roman use of blue (associated with loose women, barbarians, or effeminate men), LETHE quotes the semiotics of protest, queer artists’ work post-1970, and the Yugoslav women that shaped, then rejected, the Bauhaus movement. LETHE braids together these latent legacies and wakes them from oblivion.

Aggregate Space Gallery presents a formation of these collective unknown ancestors organized through collaborative gestures, formal urgencies, and a fluid monumentalization of the act of rebelling. Just as Lethe is the river of forgetting in ancient Greek mythology, Izidora Leber LETHE brings that river closer, so as to re-materialize disjointed moments in history. These forms, even at rest, are rooted in resistance.

This exhibition is curated by Aaron Wilder as the culminating project of Aggregate Space Gallery’s 2018 Curatorial Fellowship.

Izidora Leber LETHE is a Croatian-Swiss conceptual artist. Her work spans the disciplines of installation, sculpture, writing, and the video essay. Her main interest lies in extracting and tracing site specific (art)histories to examine their impacts onto our understanding of 'culture' today. Izidora Leber LETHE is currently living and working in Oakland and San Francisco, CA. She received her BFA from the Zurich School of the Arts in Switzerland and her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, both with honors. Leber LETHE has exhibited her work at venues including Minnesota Street Project and the DeYoung Museum. She is the recipient of the one year post-graduate Artist-In-Residence at the Hunters Point Studios 2017-2018 in San Francisco, CA as well as the Artist Residency at the BANFF Centre for the Arts in Canada. Blue-Barbar-Braid is LETHE’s first solo exhibition.

Aaron Wilder is a curator and interdisciplinary artist who blurs boundaries between the analog and the digital, the public and the private, and the unassuming and the instigative. He uses his own experiences and sense of identity as a lens through which he explores the introspective and social processes of contemporary culture. Through an analytical deconstruction of these processes, his approach is akin to that of an anthropologist, sociologist, and psychologist combined. Wilder’s concept-driven projects all incorporate his core belief that art can and should be used as a tool for generating critical thinking, dialogue, knowledge sharing, and understanding between individuals with divergent world perspectives.

Aggregate Space Gallery(ASG)

ASG envisions an Oakland where artists can make and experience art in a safe space with access to production tools and hands-on guidance, creating work that fuels critical dialogue in a time when it is desperately needed. ASG is a charitable, artist-run exhibition and performance space in West Oakland that prioritizes the exhibition of artwork that generally can’t be seen elsewhere – our mantra is “Install the Unimaginable.” We provide extensive in-house resources and expertise that enable artists to create and promote intellectually engaging and immersive projects. We also strive to provide every artwork installed in ASG with a museum-quality environment; our exhibition space is impressive and meticulously maintained.

Photography Credits:

Image courtesy of Izidora Leber LETHE

Foundational Support:

Our visual arts programming is supported generously by Zellerbach Family Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Support for the Friction / Function Performance series generously provided by Kenneth Rainin Foundation.