Aria Dean at Progetto

Artist: Aria Dean

Exhibition title: Wolves

Venue: Progetto, Lecce, Italy

Date: July 16 – November 1, 2023

Photography: Simon Veres / Courtesy of the artist and Progetto, Lecce

She lay on the floor and-not-quite cried thinking about how all productive processes are conscripted toward the production of the image of production. The thought of this clumped to the thought of saying anything about it, making her feel ill and making her heart beat so that it tapped the crown of her head against the stone in peppy tempo with her pulse. The thought of writing after collecting so much that had found a way to exit her sounded like hooking a hose up to her asshole and vacuuming her back out of herself. To imbue these mute objects with something, an anything kind of something that could at least stick to their surfaces and lend them a patina of significance, this seemed like a violence, wrought upon her and the objects equally, lovers who’d do better to leave each other be.

Some things were real: Love. Money. Iron. Stone.

Others not: Art, maybe. Pain, maybe. This place, certainly.

Some things were real: Her. The floor. Him. The animals. The sun, probably. This place, certainly.

The only stable presences on the farm were the animals. If not the animals, the relations between them. Or maybe all the relations were stable, but the substance of the place was not. The objects, the surfaces, the people, the animals were all undulating, offering architectural stabilities, surely, but vertiginous, skittering around the conceptual field, in a way at once so lodged in history and set terribly adrift from it.

A dog defends a flock of sheep. / On a farm, a flock of sheep is defended / On a farm, sheep are threatened / On a farm in Southern Italy, a dog defends his flock / A flock of sheep is defended by a dog.

A sheep sees in 360 degrees, while a dog can see about 240–which is closer than she would have thought. The dog cannot see as much as the sheep, and if you needed to extrapolate or poeticize this, perhaps this could mean that the dog possesses intuition and imagination while the sheep, seeing everything, has none of this.

Thank you to Daniele and Angelo at Torre Sant’Emiliano – Formaggi della Terra d’Otranto; La Bottega Del Ferro Sabetta; Emanuele Sergi; La Timbrotecnica Romano; Marco Vitale; Pimar Limestone.