Opening Reception: Friday, March 21, 6-8pm
Post Times is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by Aaron King.
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.
-Excerpt from Wallace Stevens, Of the Surface of Things
Sometimes the simplest of objects can hold the heaviest of feelings. Many of the works in the exhibition begin with a commonplace object – a tray of ice, a lawnmower, a recliner– that for the artist have become placeholders or markers of trauma. Through the physical act of making, King works through his relationship to these objects by arranging, rebuilding, or modifying them until they express the hard to articulate feelings and memories associated with them. This often takes the form of fully enclosed mechanical systems.
In Ice Tray, one encounters a standard ice tray on a wood table, resting on stacked milk crates, the tray is empty except for a single cube that is perpetually frozen. All alone. The ice tray is a machined-aluminum replica of a General Electric ice tray from the artist’s childhood, and a refrigeration unit is housed inside the milk crates.
Mower is a self-contained grass-growing (and grass-cutting) system constructed out of a disassembled Snapper-brand push mower. The lawn mower deck housing the blade serves as the second level of this ziggurat, with the grass one layer below and grow lighting and watering systems above. Resting atop the structure is a metal tin with the image of a boy fishing, a portrait on a portrait. The grass grows continuously, with everything on a timer, and once a week the “lawn is mowed”. And yet, in this fully-enclosed steel structure, the only evidence of grass being grown is the familiar scent of freshly cut grass, which is released into the gallery.
Recliner consists of tubing that weaves through a steel armature replicating the form of his family's recliner, which was strictly his father’s before the family escaped. That same recliner became his mother’s after the divorce. Conditioner circulates through the tubing like a vascular system, the scent being activated by its movement through the pumps that run intermittently.
Looming over the exhibition is a static wall-mounted sculpture bearing the words, NINETEEN YEARS, in a playful font with a tidy bow below. Made of thin-gauge steel tack welded together, appearing like sores, the number corresponds to the length of time that the artist’s mother was married to his abusive father.
These objects, among others in the gallery, are all tied to King’s childhood. They are transformed into mechanisms that attempt to capture not the memories themselves but the processes of and relationship to the remembering. Objects can do more than travel alongside us over time – their meanings fixed. Truth is always constructed by contradictions. Rather than a pure conduit, an object can act as a buffer, allowing us a safer proximity to the storm. But for King, these works are also a reclamation – there is joy here. The voltage that runs through these pumps, through these condensers, these electric motors and these circuit boards is grounded by the artist’s feet as they grab the floorboards of this raft.
Aaron King (b. 1983, Lakeland, FL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2005, and an Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2009. He has presented solo exhibitions at Melides Art Pavilion, Melides, Portugal; Axis Mundi Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Belinius Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, NY, among others. His work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Art in America, ArtReview, Art Papers, Huffington Post, Design Boom, TimeOut New York, and others.