Jen Aitken in conversation with Mira Dayal
Monday, January 5, 18:48
Nine, 9 Monroe St, New York, NY 10002
Mira Dayal: Oh wow, have you been firing and welding stuff in here?
Jen Aitken: Haha, kind of. I fired the ceramics in Toronto and brought them with me, and the welding I did here in New York.
M: Oh, okay.
J: So there’s a collection of 20 of these little slab things, and then I just welded those together.
M: Okay, cool.
M: That is amazing. I also thought, when you said newsprint, I was picturing actual newspaper. But now I feel the texture, and the density of text and information and images would have been totally different. This is really nice—you almost can't tell what the material is, which is cool.
J: Yeah. I like that.
M: Now that we’ve seen the room, where should we begin? I did have notes and questions—I’ve got a pen here. But we can also just keep talking about the stuff in front of us first and then go to that.
M: And the drawings—were these also kind of made in tandem with the sculptures as part of process, or what is the relationship between them?
J: They were made during this time at the gallery residency, but kind of developed as a separate… It was like after that Power Plant show—it felt like such a combination of a project that I was—and then I just showed up at a residency with kind of like, okay, this time I just wanna get back to myself. To have something more intimate and instinctive, in a sense of beginning again. So it was just doing a ton of bad drawings and seeing what happens.
M: Yeah. I see it.
J: And the same with the ceramics—it happened as I was making components for another project, and then just got excited about the slab rolling. And so they developed in tandem, just by nature of it being in the same moment—how to parallel similar kind of mark making or energy, or this sort of leaning into a form but not really ever quite being a form.
M: Yes. And I feel like it's really fun to see them layered on top of each other too, because it kind of builds up the form more, where just the repetition of marks creates more of a volume almost than if you were just looking at one.
J: Yeah, the layering is new, from this week.
M: Cool.
J: That feels more analogous to a sculpture—this sort of building of layers.
M: And there's a sense of depth also—almost photographic depth, you know?
J: Yeah, yeah.
M: I was also curious because there are a lot of straight lines, like geometric lines, in the drawings. And I imagine that the way that the slab started and the ceramic component started—the steel rod weren't initially part of that. So I wanna talk a lot about line, but maybe this is an initial foray into talking about lines. I'm curious about that relationship to how those steel rods emerged as part of the form. Maybe anticipated by the holes or in conjunction with the holes, and also how the lines became a structuring element of the drawings.
J: The lines are more obvious in the drawings—that’s the mark, in a way. There was a moment when I started this style of drawing—it’s less evident with this paper—but I was using an even more translucent paper, and it was bleeding through. A line on top would bleed through two or three pages underneath and have these little dots. So it was looking like a series of kind of Morse code things with lines and dots, and that started to become a language.
J: And then with the sculptures, it was actually just starting as a slab—the hole came way later. It was just these slabs with these ribbon slices, and then reconstituted. It was more about this kind of slit—that’s apparent in some of the Dancers. And then I had all these slabs, and they weren't enough as objects by themselves. They needed—it was a matter of, do they wanna be on the wall? Do they wanna be together? And I started—I thought they could be sheet metal in the mix for a while, or a different kind of slab to layer with it, but then I thought it was too closed of a form.
M: I see.
J: And if it could even receive another material. So the holes came. And then it became a nice reversal of the mark-making where these lines make this positive mark and the hole is like a negative mark. And the idea that the rod actually makes the hole when the clay's wet, and then the clay goes away and gets fired, and then the rod comes back and goes through the hole.
M: Cool.
M: Procedurally, one thing I wanted to ask about was that relationship between the ceramic process and the steel process, because you were mentioning splatters of glaze in relation also to the splatters of the welding heat marks.
J: They're very subtle, but they're definitely more in response to the holes. In a way, there's the dark shadow of the hole and then it gets mirrored by this dot of glaze next to it.
M: Yeah, it's fun perceptually because you can't always tell.
J: Yeah. And the spatters—I’m just so wary of ceramic getting decorative or too painty. As a sculptor, it's important that everything in it is a procedure. It's not just an arbitrary add-on. It's what you're trying to do. And so the glaze was inherent to—it’s a natural thing to add to the ceramic—but it just looked so decorative. And the welding spatter that adds on the surface necessarily allows me to sneak in glaze when you look at that image. It is still decorative, but it somehow sneaks in.
M: And it takes you back into drawing language where it feels like it could be graphic art, or it brings you back to mark-making even if it's not strictly necessary. It produces this other kind of visual information, where it almost makes it feel like these could be studies of your drawings of this, you know?
M: I also want to ask about the overall idea of the stage or the diorama that you were writing about a little bit, but also like the recesses that make this feel like this overall landscape—or the overall structure also kind of complicates the relations between things. And the idea of the stage seemed important—and these being almost figures on the stage.
J: Yes. There's so much that gets condensed into it for me. There’s this stage, there’s this leaning into making figurative sculpture. These are still very abstract, but they're way more figurative than anything I've ever done, and the title of them being Dancers just allows that even more. It made sense to have them as a group, and that there’s a performativeness inherent in the sculptures.
J: And so to allow them to have a stage and be sort of frozen in movement—in some kind of story together or relationship or an event or some situation. And then there's the idea of scale, like that they're kind of miniature and in a field together, in a kind of architectural model thing that I've done before.
M: Totally.
J: And then steel too—sometimes it's like a limb. Sometimes they're legs, but sometimes it becomes architecture. Sometimes it is like scaffolding that they're both against or something.
M: Definitely.
J: The diorama or the scale model is a kind of planning—outlining and demarcating space and becoming an organizational strategy—and then on the flip side, kind of a theatrical arena. It’s both things.
M: Yeah, and also the relationship of a blueprint type thing to the scale model and the drawing as a blueprint.
M: I do think the scale and the idea of the set or the diorama is interesting, or implied scale is interesting, because of course a lot of your work is much larger scale or takes up an entire room. So in a way this feels like these could be studies for larger sculptures that you would make. But I also feel like in a way the idea of the diorama or stage as opposed to just scale model makes it feel less about implied scale and more just about an imaginative space. There’s less specificity to just the idea of this being a stage set where the relative actual scale isn't really what's important, or there isn't necessarily a specific implied scale. It's more just about relation among parts or allowing other things to happen.
J: Yeah, nothing stays put in that way. They reference or evoke certain things, but they never get a literal interpretation of something.
M: And with that idea of the stage set, how did you think about the actual relative placement of things or implied relations between these two being here as opposed to that one being here? For example, the relationship of the drawings to the sculptures within the stage.
J: That was more straightforward. It just felt like there was enough going on, and from there it almost felt like making a gallery within a gallery.
M: Yeah, I bet.
J: Imagining if your eye goes through things the way your body would if these were scaled and this is a room and moving around. The forms are complicated. There are two different materials going on. There are different mediums—the drawings and the sculptures. There's all these levels. So it’s a pretty clean grid of arrangement. And the column in the gallery is kind of shooting through all this.
M: Yeah, that's fun. It echoes what's happening in the sculptures. It’s good to incorporate it rather than ignore it.
J: Yeah, I thought about it a lot. I thought, oh, it would be fun to build another column as a sculpture myriad or something. And it was wild how, when I first came into this space a few months ago, it felt really big. But then the more I've been working in here, I was like, oh no, it's pretty tight actually. The table had to be quite low. I did try it high, but all of a sudden it was just insane.
M: Yeah.
J: I thought it'd be nice to have more variation, but the space just doesn't really allow for it.
M: And this feels more like hand-height—like it's meant for manipulation more. It’s like you could pick it up and read it, you know?
J: Yeah, yeah. Like a work table.
J: I was thinking of the drawings too as—like, the whole thing that I think about, it’s like a scale model sculpture-garden. With the Courtyard title being kind of like indoor/outdoor hybrid space. And these read like little water features or something—like a reflection or a pool?
M: That's nice, yeah. That also makes me think of excavations. Like they're kind of like digging or scratching. Or like a pile of twigs, you know?
J: Oh, yeah.
M: There's something much more raw material about them, which I guess does relate back to the process or being a visual language in that sense of raw material that the sculptures also draw on. There’s something elemental about them. It’s the basic components that make the sculptures. Like your film at the Power Plant. It’s like, “here's the language and then here's the sculptures.” Even though they're not binary in this case, there's something about that relationship still.
J: Yeah. It’s the form or the language in its pure abstract sense, and then it takes on dimension and texture and weight in our world, but stays in this suggestive space. And this is one version of what that might become in real space.
M: Wow. It also made me think of earlier today—I was reading part of this book about Ursula Le Guin's maps. She would draw maps before writing one of her stories.
J: Oh, really? Huh.
M: It includes illustrations of all these maps that she drew, and then different people reflecting on use of maps in her writing. There's something nice about that too, thinking of this as this kind of very abstracted map, and then the other sort of characters on the stage as almost like—there is something sci-fi about these too, you know?
J: Nice.
M: They even feel a little bit like creatures in dystopia, or maybe still incubating—things coming to life or structures coming to life or things to potentially inhabit. So maybe there’s something about that going on too.
J: Yeah, I think it's the metal maybe. It might be the metal and the ceramic combination—it reads as like an organic and technological hybrid there, which feels better. And the guts splattering.
M: Yeah. I was also looking at some of the other work that you were referencing, which reminded me of the Fontana ceramics with slashes through them and stuff that I think you were thinking about, which have a kind of violence to them in a way. Which is maybe not the intention—there's a visual softness in terms of the palette being light and reflective and airy overall, but there is something kind of gory in that way. Also got all these punctures and things impaling other things, or being put in a potential state of collapse or something. And a sense of fragility in them also. So I wonder how you think about that.
J: Yeah. I mean, mostly feeling a kind of vulnerability in them, and this intimacy between me and the form, and also between the two elements in each. There's this recurring pair in each work—the drawings are pairs and each sculpture has these two ceramic ones. It feels like an intimacy between them. I’ve been seeing a vulnerability and a dynamic there. But to read it as violent is—maybe revealing.
M: Yeah, fragility, like an aliveness. A kind of surrender, or like—
J: Yeah.
M: I didn't initially notice the twoness of all the sculptures themselves, although it's maybe more obvious with the drawings.
M: You talked about a sense of vulnerability in terms of a different way of working—trying to not have as much of a framework ahead of time and being more guided by the materials. Do you want to elaborate on that? Like what led you to that process, or if that is the kind of vulnerability that you're…
J: Yeah, I think it's related for sure. Material has always been important and not an afterthought, but it does drive the form. Like a concrete sculpture—it needs to be concrete. It can't be something else if there's like interim added to it.
But I think the main thing is this geometric vocabulary I was using for so long—everything conformed to 90 degrees and 45 degrees and these segments of circles. And it was a process of combining those elements into different compositions with different materials. Whether it's a solid cast volume or a two-dimensional plane or a line drawing in space—those strategies were conforming to this language. It was generative for a long time, a way to make things belong to a cohesive world. It acted like language so each piece would be this accumulative sentence structure, with a sense of syntax.
And then it culminated in that animation at the Power Plant, literally called Lexicon! with an exclamation point, and it just felt finished after that. I wanted to take all that structure away and see what would happen if I started making something without any predetermined ideas or rules—what would come from nothing. There was an honesty and a vulnerability and a fear. It's like, what are you doing if you don't know what you're doing?
M: Totally.
Do you wanna talk a little bit more about the sculptures that led to these? The clay strips with the metal strips that were echoing their forms—I feel like obviously there's a direct material relationship. They’re a precursor to these, but did those come before the Power Plant or after?
J: Actually before. And then they were sort of just on ice for a while. They didn't get attention until after. There was a series called Palaces, and it was strips of ceramic—one to two inch bands—either straight or curved. That would get fired and brought back to the studio and arranged in space with analogous bands of steel, between one to two inches, that I could curve or leave straight and weld together in these architectural, playful, scaled-model-ish but totally abstract constructions.
It was moving away from drawings-in-space with steel bands all by themselves. It was taking that idea and torquing it a little bit, so it became less about looking at the bands as the edges of a negative spatial volume and more—I almost thought of them like painting brushstrokes. They felt like objects more than dealing with geometry. They started to be more organic and expressive and romantic. And from there it gave me a way out.
M: Totally, yeah. Like a bridge. The title of that show was Romantic Gestures?
J: Yeah, yeah.
M: I thought that was interesting too, because it made sense with the tone of your work—there’s often a sense of fragility and also texturally a relationship to bodies or skin. But it did also feel more figurative, even though the sculptures weren't representational. It felt less purely abstract. So it's kind of an interesting bridge into these.
And those were—I just saw the images—but were those a similar scale to these?
J: Pretty similar, yeah.
M: Okay.
J: So I was making more of those when I came to this. It was like rolling out slabs that I would then cut into strips. I was rolling out a slab and cutting it into strips and thinking, “Oh, this is kind of something all on its own,” before I turned it into these other things. So I stopped halfway on the way to making that work and went in a different direction.
M: What do you think it is about the slab that you were drawn to, that stuck with you?
J: I think you said the word skin—it’s something about that. They feel like faces or masks. There's so much about your hands and your body. It's like the shape and size of a piece of dough or something. I'm not totally sure yet, to be honest. It feels like some kind of mystery. And it's also the space between being flat and three-dimensional. It's like a relief kind of space. It’s got a back and a front, which is new for me.
There’s this compressed sculptural space. There’s like two inches of depth in the whole thing. So it feels like an image and a form at the same time. And it's like a quarter inch thick or something—it’s quite a fragile plane.
M: Yeah, and something about the folds. Most of them have a fold at the edge that almost feels like it's enclosing something, or it's in the process of—like you fold it over so you can roll it out one more time. There's something mid-process about that, which is intriguing. And in some of them there's a middle that feels like tectonic plates, things pushing together again.
J: Yeah, that's nice. Pleats, yeah.
M: This one especially made me think of those bookstands at a library. Or like a book of context even. And the two-ness also feels like the spread of a book, like something that's open like this, or front and back covers. So it seems like there's a relationship to paper, and also even to fabric, with those folded strips. They feel like pleats or belts.
J: Yeah, definitely belts.
M: And some of your earliest work, on your website at least, included fabric as a kind of encasement that led to the concrete works, right?
J: Yeah. I actually studied fashion before art. I had two years of a fashion degree and was making clothing that got more and more sculptural. My graduating piece for my BFA was a very minimalist plinth sculpture that then had these outfit changes—fabric sculptures that fit over it—and I would go on doing some change-out painting every day.
M: That's cool.
J: It’s true, the ribbon folding back on itself feels very couture or something.
M: Yeah, and also in art history thinking about representation of folds in fabric—carving in stone, and in painting. And that has a relationship to wealth, and skill as a painter in being able to represent folds. It feels like there are a couple chains of association there that are fun to think through.
J: Paper for sure. It feels like hand-making paper. Some of the clay is actually this thing called paperclay, where there's paper fiber in the clay. They make it less breakable, I think. You can see the way it kind of rips as it folds. It has this papery quality.
M: That’s fun.
J: I didn’t know they did this.
M: Interesting.
J: Something about it feels Japanese sometimes. Like there's a calligraphy aesthetic to the lines.
M: I’m not sure, but the way the joints emerge on one side—they become these characters on a page almost, for some of them. Or like lines on a page. And a handmade paper feeling too.
J: Yes.
M: There’s something about it that feels like printmaking too. The ink drawings especially—they feel like they could be lithographs, the way the ink is sitting in them.
J: Maybe 'cause of the splatters on the surface.
M: Totally.
I was curious to hear more about your relationship to painting too, because it seems like it comes up in the way that you talk about these as being sculpture in a way that's closer to painting, or the painterly gestures in the sculptures.
J: I mean, it's always been in my work a little bit. I remember when I was making those cast concrete sculptures, talking about each side of the concrete thing being like a kind of monotone. You had this flat plane of gray, but there's all this information in the gray. There’s subtlety in this poetry of gray on gray on gray. And I’d have little bits of pink foam that would come out and mark the edges.
M: That's fun.
J: Mostly, talking to people who make sculpture, they're more conceptually based—thinking through ideas and then ideas become form. And painters—I'm really bad with generalizing—but painters can kind of be with the material in a way. This commitment to one material and seeing what it can do. I've had painter envy my whole time, but somehow can't just make a painting. I can't do it.
The way I was working before was building models, settling on a model, building a mold, casting the form. I’ve talked about the making-the-art part and then the building-the-form part—they're never the same. It's not the same labor. And I envy a painter where making decisions and making the thing is the same activity. So I wanted to find a way to make sculptures in that way.
This feels like that kind of work to me, where there's no labor in this sculpture that isn't a formal decision. Everything I'm doing becomes part of the work. There's no extra part.
M: Yeah, that's interesting. I’m also not a painter, but I feel like with oil painting there is a sense of time and layers. The underpainting can be visible or buried. There can be a painting underneath a painting. So there's something fun about thinking about that—maybe it's a condensed or more layered process that's kind of smooshed together in this different way. In a casting process, the mold is not part of the final object. The canvas holds all of the layers at once.
J: Yeah, it holds them all.
M: And these—like you have the slab and all the layers of work and rolling out the slab. And then on top of that you get the splattering marks from the welding. Everything is compacted in that way.
J: Yeah.
M: Something about that feels really good too.
J: Yeah, yeah. And then it's all additive. We don't worry about sanding down or painting over.
M: I’m curious about the iteration too, because in a way these feel like you made one and then made the next one in response and continued that way. Or it almost feels like there's some amount of interchangeability—maybe the slab started with this armature and ended up being on this armature. It feels like there's exchange among them. And with the drawings it feels like they could be placed in relation to different sculptures.
M: I was looking at Anthony Caro's tabletop sculptures, which I think you told me about a while ago, and I hadn’t looked them up before today. And I was like—there’s an immense body of work to make. I think it's 20 or more. Once you have that constraint of tabletop sculpture, there's so much possible invention. They start going off the table and exceed that constraint. But there’s something about that inventiveness—once you arrive at the scale, it allows for all this iteration within that. So I wanted to hear you talk more about iteration.
J: Yeah, and it’s funny—this was challenging, to work with that kind of iteration. With the Palaces, the components were more versatile—it would just be a band, and so they would combine in all kinds of configurations. It was about building form with that.
And this—the slab was such a particular given. There's not much room. It’s just this real flat sheet, and it doesn’t combine in that many ways. So I was like, “Okay,” I somehow knew I wanted two. I liked the relationship between the two. One on its own felt too frontal. And any more, they start to feel—so the mirror of back to back was really nice. But then it became—there’s three here that are kind of back to back, and two that are more side by side, oriented the same way next to each other.
It felt like this form is a given, and there's less iteration on a different kind of composition or structure. The iteration becomes more in the subtleties of how they’re leaning against each other. These two have feet, these ones have stick legs. Those ones are intendedly in the same direction. These ones are leaning towards each other, and this one’s lifted off the ground. It’s more subtle differences. It really does feel like two dancers in a kind of embrace consistently.
And that one—maybe like a lift, or a… what's that called when you pull someone underneath them—
M: Whatever that is.
J: You know that thing when you're swing dancing where you're like, “I'm gonna go under.” Yeah. That's what that is.
M: So cool.
J: And this is like this like two—
M: You had an opening book. I was thinking of it more like they hold hands and lean away from each other. That kind of counter balance.
J: Totally. It’s also really cool to think about what comes first—what motion came first. Is it coming down or is that one lifting the other one up? It's different from every angle too.
M: Yeah.
J: From where I'm sitting, it's more up. But I know there’s a dual tension and dynamic that comes from the two-ness of the series.
M: They feel frozen in a movement, but you're not sure what the movement is necessarily. There's a sense of energy. It’s similar to what you were saying about not sure if they're falling apart or half becoming into being.
Maybe you should talk more about the idea of dance too, because I know you talked about this interest or desire to move more towards the figurative. But Dancers is a more specific term that has a lot of associations. I think I understand where that came from in terms of the forms, but I'm curious how that came about and what else you're thinking about.
J: I think of a dancer as a sculptural body. It's like making form with your body.
Art sometimes can be hard. How do I wanna say this properly? It’s easier to get into an instinctive way of being or head space when you're dancing than when you're looking at art. But when art really moves me, it's a similar space. It's like my mind is lagging behind my being somehow. It hits you and then your brain catches up to tell you why it's hitting you. The first pull is not actually a cerebral one. It's emotional or physical or psychic somehow.
M: Totally.
J: A dance can hit you in that same way. All kinds of dance—doing it, watching it. There's an empathic thing of watching someone else dance and feeling it in your own body.
And I also find form in dance really interesting from a sculptural perspective. There’s someone I was reading—Suzanne Langer, maybe? She was talking about the idea of a dynamic form, that the dancer's moving and yet somehow it adds up to a sense of form. If you take any one frozen moment, it's not the whole thing. You need the totality of the dance to arrive at the form, and yet you can't describe it in an image.
M: Totally.
J: She was talking about a waterfall as an analogy. The waterfall has this dynamic form. It's not static. Its form is in the movement. So these are obviously static, but there’s a sense of movement. I want them to evoke in my body a sense of movement, something to bypass your interpretive brain.
M: Totally. That reminds me of The Forest for the Trees title—trying to see both the instant and the overall movement, the small thing and the larger part it composes at the same time. The water droplet and the waterfall.
J: Yeah, totally.
M: Which is maybe the interest in a physicality or a material, and focus on that as well as the overall form and flow that it creates. The static heavy thing and also the fluid thing.
J: Yeah. And I think art in general too—it’s like…the whole—it’s like… And I think that's why I'm interested in sculpture especially. All objects are objects, and yet a sculpture somehow has this extraness. It's more than the sum of its parts, if it’s a good one. It transcends its objectness.
M: Yeah.
I also have a process question about the armatures and the slabs. I imagine as you're making these, it’s not welded yet. Is there some amount of making an armature for the armature? Or how do you prop them up before you—
J: It's not even that organized. I just trial and error it. Weld something. Don’t like it, rip it off. Unweld something, keep ripping it off. Just tack it gently until I'm committed and then I really weld it.
M: Okay. So you’re clamping things together on the table to lean and then weld them quickly in place and then take the clamp away?
J: Yeah.
M: So in that sense, are you starting with the parts that puncture the ceramic and then working towards the feet?
J: Yeah. It starts by each ceramic thing getting a kind of metal—grip sort of. A vest, you know? A hold on itself. And then welding from there.
M: So these skewer things or ties that go into the holes happen first, and then you can add from there.
J: Yeah.
M: Which is fun to think about, because visually it feels like a stand that the ceramics are hung on. Like the stand or feet came first and then the slabs. But the slabs can't just be placed because the structure is determined by the holes in the ceramics. So the process would have to be reversed for that to be true. It's a fun reverse engineering thing when I’m looking at them.
J: I like that. Do you also try and figure out how exactly something was made when you look at it?
M: Yeah. I always do it, and then it's wild to realize people aren't doing that. Especially because of the two materials that are finished or made solid in different ways. This wouldn't go into the kiln. The steel would probably melt, right? Or become liquid. I don’t actually know the respective temperatures for fire and clay, but—
J: I think clay's probably higher.
M: Oh yeah, 'cause you can melt metal, you can get metal glazes and stuff that would melt. Which would also be a fun experiment—to see what happens if you had some of the steel things already in it.
J: Collecting reasons to get my own kiln.
M: Yeah. Stuff they won't let you do at public kilns.
Have you done printmaking before or is that more just a feeling?
J: I've done silkscreen, which I liked for a different reason, but I always wanted to do litho, etching, yeah. I think the labor is a barrier. Especially lithography. That’s a super intense process. I would want the process to really be part of it somehow—there's something about the stone. Something in there of stone sculpture becoming a print.
M: Totally.
One thing we didn't really talk about yet is the idea of the courtyard, which I know you referenced with the idea of the scale model. But also when I read your notes I was like, “Is there also a courtyard?” Will they be outside or is that just a concept? I like the idea of a space within a space, or weird sort of on the outside. This is the inside but this is also like an outside that we are inside of. There's something fun about that. I wondered what else you were thinking about.
J: I was thinking about landscape architecture, and the table being a kind of terrain. Architecture being compressed and flattened outside. Plaza spaces as connective tissue between architecture. I was very into brutalism for a long time—the way one building flattens out into terrain and then becomes another building. They’re not separate, it's this whole… plazas as connective tissue between architecture.
And the courtyard felt like inside-out-ness. There was something about this that felt exterior. And the centrality of it, like an island and we kind of move around it. We fall into a courtyard, but this central space within a space felt vaguely more like a courtyard than anything else.
Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor based in New York. She produces sculptures, drawings, installations, books, and interdisciplinary works that create and iterate larger systems of meaning. Dayal has recently presented solo exhibitions at Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; and Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia. Recent group exhibition venues include Van Abbehuis, Eindhoven, Netherlands; the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Feral File; Barnard College, New York; Miriam, Brooklyn; and lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA. Dayal has been supported by residencies at Fountainhead, Miami; the Steel Yard, Providence, RI; Ox-Bow, Saugatuck, MI; Art in General, New York; and A.I.R. Gallery at Governor's Island, NY. Dayal is also senior editor at Triple Canopy, co-editor of Track changes: a handbook for art criticism (Paper Monument, 2023), and co-publisher of the collaborative artist book series prompt:. She teaches at Barnard College and the School of Visual Arts.
Jen Aitken is based in Toronto, Canada. She makes sculptures that combine perceptual ambiguity with structural clarity. She uses common industrial materials to create unidentifiable forms about intimacy, syntax, and bodily space. Aitken presented her first institutional solo show at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2023, titled The Same Thing Looks Different, which was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. Her first large-scale public sculpture was installed at the new headquarters of the National Bank of Canada, Montreal, in 2023. She was commissioned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, to create a site-specific installation for its 2020 Women to Watch exhibition. Aitken is represented by Trépanier Baer gallery in Calgary, Alberta, and her work is in public collections across Canada, including Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Photos courtesy of Site Service
Photographed by Chris Hernandez
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