Foundry Art Centre Proudly Presents

"Child's Play"

A Group Show Including the Art of Aaron Wilder

January 4-February 15, 2019

Foundry Art Centre

520 North Main Center

Saint Charles, MO 63301

 Memories and experiences of childhood become imprinted on the consciousness in a permanent way. Seeing toys we played with, pictures we drew, and characters that were real or imaginary give us a sense of nostalgia. “Child’s Play” is an international, all-media exhibition celebrating the child within. The concept of this show is to revisit childlike ideas, behaviors, symbols, and imagery to bring some whimsy and childlike innocence into our adult lives.

Work from the following projects by Aaron Wilder is included in the exhibition:

Expletive: This is an experiment in the aestheticization of derogatory labels. Aaron Wilder employs vividness, repetition, and the form of text to disempower slurs used everyday by obscuring the word through the stacking of its letters on top of each other. What remains is an aesthetic and geometric arrangement of shapes.

Imaginary Friends: 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. “Imaginary Friends” is a series of black and white 35mm film photograph triptychs that jumble distinctions of affect associated with past, present, and future. Seeking neither nostalgia nor suppression of memory, this project questions notions of authenticity, subjectivity, and truthfulness in how we relate to and simultaneously distance ourselves from childhood joys and traumas.

Neither Sand nor Rock: 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. This series started as sequential photography collages that are neither linear nor cyclical, but represent a meditation on the psychological, imaginative, and physical gaps between childhood and adulthood.