The Weight of Silence

Artist statement

It begins with open clarity, an unimpeded, weightless azure as the sky.

Marks come cascading randomly, sticking with no visible origin, layered and relentless like driving rain. Each one covers the last until the surface, reconfigured again and again, as if it was never clear.

As a viewer starts, also bathed in light while standing enclosed, held inside. The gathering haze plays out on their bodies as well as the environment as it continues to dim while the source of this burdening never appears. Only its result, its residue.

Whatever lies beyond the surface carries on unseen. Like its actions, it isn’t absent, only buried.

Silence isn’t the absence of sound, it is what builds up when nothing is allowed through.

About the artist

Aaron Young was born in 1972 in San Francisco. He attended San Francisco Art Institute in 2001 and then received an MFA from Yale University in 2004. His work has been exhibited internationally in many exhibitions including P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City (2005), the Whitney Biennial, New York (2006), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006) and the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007). He lives and works in New York City.

Aaron Young’s artworks rely on the aftereffects of dynamic, energetic, and sometimes even dangerous performances. He hires participants stereotyped as marginalized rebels, such as skateboarders and motorcycle riders, to perform various stunts in exhibition spaces on specially prepared platforms, such as the performance Arc Light for the exhibition for what you are about to receive. Like Steven Parrino, Young uses destructive actions as generative force; the traces of his ephemeral acts are recorded as videos, drawings, sculptures, and photographs to constitute artistic artifacts. In Arc Light, Young takes Robert Rauschenberg’s iconoclastic gesture, Automobile Tire Print (1951), as his starting point. But in the place of the older artist’s single tire track, Young produces an opus of traces of the complex and intricate choreography performed by a team of riders, and thus an unexpected, updated, and expanded interpretation of Jackson Pollock’s seminal “action paintings.”