Aaron Wilder
Blurring Boundaries: Social Construction, Memory, Perspective
As we move, experiences become more fragmented. Are we moving forward? At inconsistent points of transitions in speed, perspectives blur. Are we seeing clearly?
I blur boundaries between the analog and the digital, the public and the private, and the unassuming and the instigative. I use my own experiences and sense of identity as a lens through which I explore the introspective and social processes of contemporary culture. Through an analytical deconstruction of these processes, my approach both incorporates and critiques elements of the fields of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. My concept-driven projects all incorporate the 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.
My practice seeks to investigate social constructs. A social construct is a mechanism or category developed by society that forwards perception of an individual or group that is created culturally as opposed to biologically. Social constructs include gender, race, religion, and many other groupings. These social constructs are perpetuated by how a child is raised, language and other communication practices, and visible signs including advertising, popular culture, and education. While there are some innocuous impacts of social constructs, there are also many negative aspects, including sustaining systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. My intent is to foster dialogue about the multiple, intersecting forms of social construction in our culture and the pervasive, dominant narratives perpetuating them.
Memory is an important material with which I work. When I was 17 years old, I was in a near-fatal car accident. My biological function of remembering has since been unreliable to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish between memory's relation to fact and memory's relation to fiction. With age comes an exponential acceleration of memory obsolescence; faster and faster. Just as I was extricated from that automobile in 2003, each attempt to disentangle my brain's own remembering functionality is an attempted extrication of reality from my flawed recollection.
Inspiration in my practice is represented as ideas passing through the filters of social construction, memory, and perspective. The result of that filtering then dictates the materials and methods through which concepts are expressed, displayed, and discussed.