Description
The Delaware Division of the Arts’ Mezzanine Gallery presents 2022 DDOA Individual Artist Fellow Aaron Terry’s exhibition, “Patterns for Saturn,” running June 3-July 28, 2023. Guests are invited to attend a Meet-the-Artist Reception on Friday, June 2 from 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Aaron Terry, a Wilmington resident and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Design at The University of Delaware, created site-specific work for the Mezzanine Gallery located in the Carvel State Office Building. Terry made a series of screen printed fabric wall hangings that provide a contrast to the hard surfaces and neutral palette of the building.
Aaron Terry’s work dances between sculptural, sonic, and printed materials that present visual allegories of personal politics embedded in the color, flash, and cadence of today’s rapid-fire media parade. Sourcing from personal drawings, recordings, sound bites and news media, the work resurrects new conversations with old ghosts, and questions the potential for a better future. As visual pop and politics synthesize in continuous flux to create an extended detournement; Terry utilizes repetitive sonic and visual elements to reinvigorate progressive ideas nested in music and cultural references that have devolved and diminished through false familiarity over time. His work grapples with finding “truth” in a sea of today’s excessive media.
Patterns for Saturn considers the importance of dreamlife: time spent outside of lived reality. This includes a loose sense of meditation: time spent shaking off contemplation and frustration with today’s crushing sense of political and cultural hooliganism. Abstract patterns and a soundtrack blanket the walls of the gallery, to remove the viewer from the space: the Carvel State Office Building in Wilmington, DE. This is both a respite from and a comment on the architecture and atmosphere of state and governmental buildings in general. The visual patterns and sounds produced in the space are meant to provide a space for escape, contemplation, and meditation.
Terry’s work has been seen in ten solo exhibitions and over 30 group shows, as well as a half-dozen murals and installations. He is a member of Philadelphia’s Vox Populi artist collective. In 2022, Terry received a Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship in Visual Arts: Works on Paper.
The Mezzanine Gallery, open weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., is located on the second floor of the Carvel State Office Building, 820 N. French Street, Wilmington. Please note that the Gallery will be closed on June 19 and July 4 in observance of holidays.
Image: Aaron Terry. “Salad Daze”, Screen Print on Denim. 44”x96”. 2022.