January 20 - February 13, 2022
From Art Tooth:
“Art Tooth’s newest exhibit is up at the Soma Micro park on South Main. Sarah Ayala’s installation “Cuntrol: A Lavish Socioeconomic Ecosystem Controlling the Underfunded” refers to the financial and social ecosystem created to control the underfunded and undersupported classes within the male-centric society.
A visual representation of the likeness and juxtaposition of current American society with the frivolity of Neoclassicism during the Ancien Régime. All in hopes to inspire reflection upon our mass obsession with image and consumption and our lack of true care. Looming weeping willows allude to society’s departure from nature in the most basic sense and our masking of that separation to live in aesthetic ignorance. An elite and lavish tablescape is presented with culinary sculptures of what we are at times forced to consume. We are forced to accept government payments that serve as bandaids while most are bleeding out. Forced to watch a slice of hope for livable hourly wages be denied to us by 58 senators. We are forced to take medication and hormones to the detriment of our bodies as our partners refuse reproductive responsibility, lest we’ll be denied access to abortion that force at-home healthcare alternatives all while sometimes only earning ¢57 to every white man’s dollar. This Cuntrol remains on some while others float above and along, untouched but enjoying the elegance and their seat at the table.
Past as prologue:
This cake series began when the stimulus checks were distributed due to the economic fallout from the very real coronavirus pandemic. The words “Let them eat..” are in reference to a quote misattributed to Marie Antoinette (Queen of France during the French Revolution), suggesting her starving subjects simply “eat cake” instead. Although she is unlikely to have actually said this, the tone-deaf attitude resonates with our current social, political, and economic struggles that came to a head in 2020. With a cyclical lens, if the flashy present harks back to the Neoclassical era (1760-1830) associated with this quote, said era, in turn, took its inspiration from Classical Antiquity (800 BCE-600 CE). This decadent Louis XVI style was enthralled with the cultures from Ancient Greece, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. This antiquity was emphasized with xenophobia, the enslavement of people, and severe mistreatment of women. These Greco-Roman ideas became a basis of all drama, literature, and art that spilled into the Roman Empire which invaded most of Europe, that then infested the Western Hemisphere and claimed it as a “new world”. Those cultures violently became our foundations and repeatedly throughout the ages we touch back and honor these ideas with a new way to gild them in each return.
To see more of Sarah Ayala’s work visit www.sarahayala.com or on Instagram at @sarahrayala”
Reception: January 20, 2022 | 5–8 pm
125 South Main Street
Fort Worth, 76104 Texas
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