Intersect Arts Center Proudly Presents

Ritual

A Group Show Including the Art of Aaron Wilder

May 10 - September 5, 2021

Intersect Arts Center

3636 Texas Avenue

Saint Louis, MO 63118

Ritual: an act we perform with our bodies. A practice we repeat, over and over again, until it becomes ingrained in our very bones. A knowledge that has been resting within us for millenia, passed to us by those who came before. A routine we preserve in its original form or that we creatively mold to our present circumstances. Religions and spiritual traditions throughout history have clung to ritual as a form of preservation, faith, and connection to the past and future. This exhibition exhibits artists' views on embodied ritual within a spiritual life.

Intersect Arts Center is a place of community with creativity at its core. Located in St. Louis City, Intersect engages with area youth, adults, elderly, artists, congregants, educators, and activists to connect art and community, creating a collective expression of identity and belonging between a very diverse intersection of people.

Intersect is a place focused on accessibility and community development through the arts. They provide arts education for youth and adults, exhibition and studio spaces for working artists, and maker spaces for the public.

Through after-school programming, community events and classes, exhibitions, artist residencies, and studio facilities, Intersect offers many opportunities for engagement. Their interdisciplinary approach encompasses visual art, dance, drama, music, creative writing, technology, photography, and culinary arts.

Work from Aaron Wilder's Habitual Detritus, Imaginary Friends, Neither Sand nor Rock, and Work on Paper projects is included in the exhibition:

Habitual Detritus: "In fact, self-destructiveness is the first of human weaknesses. When we know all the ways in which we can be self-destructive that will be very valuable knowledge indeed." - Agnes Martin
This project is an eight day performative exploration of waste aesthetics as a result of habitual indulgence in addictive substances. It is a meditation on self-destructive tendencies and notions of failure as an artist and human being.

Imaginary Friends: This is a series of black and white 35mm film photograph triptychs of increasing enlarger blur that jumble distinctions of affect associated with past, present, and future. Memory, like technology, obsolesces. Like the eager anticipation of the newest smartphone, compulsive human motion and consumption ultimately lead to the hastening of our physical, cultural, and social deterioration. As time passes, objects and photographs slowly replace our connection to feelings held by our younger selves.  These triptychs use stuffed animals as stand-ins for the artist in incomplete memories of childhood scenes exploring normative expectations relating to gender, religion, and other social constructs.

Neither Sand nor Rock: This is a series of sequential photography collages that are neither linear nor cyclical, but represent a meditation on the psychological, imaginative, and physical gaps between childhood and adulthood. Each piece mixes collages of toy building blocks at various stages of completeness or incompleteness as either Mommy's house or Daddy's house. The psyches and personalities of children are built upon the foundations of the priorities and insecurities of their parents. These priorities and insecurities are a tangled web of subjective feelings and reactions of notions of identity vis-à-vis religion, socio-economic status, gender, and countless other forces. Neither Sand nor Rock is a series focusing on the construction and deconstruction of personhood and the expectations of intersecting (and at times clashing) belief systems.

Work on Paper: Pieces that incorporate collage and pastel in a repetitious series commenting on the artist's role in society, the function of labor within the gap between tedium and intrinsic motivation, and the attachment of identity to how we sustain our livelihoods.