By
Aaron Wilder
Piece description from the artist
My “Expletive” series is an ongoing experiment in the aestheticization of derogatory labels. I employ 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. I have been called some, but not all the slurs included in the series. Some of the included slurs are commonly applied to communities of which I am not a part. Instead of focusing solely on the lived experience aspect of this concept, I seek to create dialogue about the use of slurs in our society. What are other ways we can deconstruct the power of these words?
Aaron Wilder is an interdisciplinary artist who mixes painting, collage, photography, graphic design, video, sound, writing, sculpture, and installation to blur 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 artistic 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.
Originally from Arizona, Aaron Wilder has also lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and France and currently resides in Chicago. Wilder has been creating art since 2002 and has shown at exhibitions in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Washington, DC as well as Italy. Wilder received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017 and has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions and 96 group exhibitions.
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