Sculpture School: Concrete

Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Dallas, TX
September 7th - November 16th, 2024

Participating Artists: Tatiana Sky, Ariel Wood, Valentina Jager, & Dalila Sanabria

“Ariel Wood’s work summons the essence of plumbing and drainage, inhabiting this vocabulary to speak of an underlying system of interconnectedness. Their sculptures hint at the hidden bodies navigating and overlapping through nature, the built environment, and the edges of development where roads taper off into the horizon. Often, these systems become evident on the surface, with a ceramic pipe offering a glimpse or providing an outlet for release. For Wood, the container of the pipe point to the feminine and the queer, citing Anne Carson’s observations that the Greeks historically express women as a wet and formless content to be contained.

A native of Southern California, Woods introduced the cohort to the essay ‘How Eden Lost its Garden,’ an exploration of Los Angeles' post-war construction. In this piece, Mike Davis recounts how, by the 1970s, nearly a third of the city was suffocated under a blanket of concrete. A brief internet search today suggests this figure is nearly 60%. The Los Angeles River, famously entombed in concrete, stands as a stark emblem of control and containment, mirroring the larger narrative of nature subdued in American cities, a tale familiar to those who know the sprawling expanse of the Metroplex.

Detention basins, structures that temporarily hold runoff following rains, have worked their way into Wood’s lexicon. An engineered pause, the basin manages the deluge, providing the ability to contain and control amidst chaos. With its dual purpose of holding and letting go, the basin mimics the body’s internal systems, oscillating between acceptance and rejection. In ‘detention; 32.77, -96.82’, the geographical coordinates in the title points viewers to the location of the North Tower Detention Center, which overlooks the Trinity River. For Wood, ‘by translating the architecture of a Dallas jail into the infrastructure of a detention basin, correlations between the materiality, austerity, and short-sightedness of both facilities may come into particular focus.’”

- Sweet Pass Sculpture School: Concrete catalogue by Trey Burns; DM @sweetpasssculpturepark for a copy