“Aria Dean: Facts Worth Knowing,” Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2024

In 1916 after the financial failure of his movie Intolerance – a film which acted as his response to the critics of his controversial blockbuster Birth of a Nation – D.W. Griffith abandoned the film’s set at the intersection of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard. It was a re-creation of the ancient city of Babylon, with a replica of the Ishtar Gate, likely made of wood and plaster, flattened and thin, held up by scaffolding. The backdrop was larger than life, adorned with columns and statues of elephants, lions, warriors, and, at one point, hundreds of extras. The set was eventually condemned by the Los Angeles Fire Department as hazardous. In his book of Hollywood gossip and quasi reportage, Kenneth Anger wrote of Griffith’s Babylon that it was “stranded like some gargantuan dream…. Something of a challenge to the burgeoning film industry – something to surpass, something to live down.” [1]

Just a couple of miles from this intersection, Aria Dean’s exhibition “Facts Worth Knowing” resurrects and reimagines the debris of that gargantuan dream. Admittedly – the show’s title may be read as an allusion to this – the viewer must rely on the press release or the gallery attendant to understand this context. And admittedly, the exhibition would feel rather dull without this framework – or scaffolding, to stick with the scene. Dean’s sculptures are strewn about the gallery, some looking unfinished or destroyed, others displayed like artifacts from a natural history museum. The elephants that adorned the original set and its iterations have been dismembered here, cast in bronze, raised on stilts or flattened. In one work, o, ye I encountered context exposed at the nape of your neck/stripped flat to hold space for your friends (all works 2024), an elephant melts into a brass pile, only recognizable by the shape of an ear or a contorted trunk. Other elephant parts are placed on stands, detached from the whole. In the visible (torso) world or o, II, for example, a foot or a trunk or tusk looks like a cubist bird or a phallus.

Aria Dean, “o, ye I encountered context exposed at the nape of your neck/stripped flat to hold space for your friends,” 2024

The sculptures were constructed using 3D modeling, based on different iterations of the Babylon set: from the video game LA Noire, which, though anachronistically, features Griffith’s Babylon, and a mall on Hollywood Boulevard that, until recently, was a re-created version of the set. In this process of merging and reimagining the site’s different versions, Dean ends up with sculptures that have been reduced to their basic forms and structures. The elephants are rendered as steel skeletons or flattened into the ground or geometricized in bronze. Armatures that resemble the original set’s scaffolding hold up nothing. The mangled steel armatures in the gallery, like recently collapsed architecture, suggest a kind of breakdown frozen in action. A matte brass column has been cut in half. The gallery is the host to a kind of ruin of a fake archaeological site which then became a real one. Though the original set and its simulations are perhaps more alluring than the sculptures themselves, Dean demonstrates the Baudrillardian suggestion that the simulation is just as real if not more so than the thing it simulates. Creating a ruin of a ruin of a ruin, she inserts herself in this endless cycle of decomposition.

Babylon represents luxury; it’s a city symbolic of greed and materialism. Naturally, it has been used as a metaphor for Hollywood – the industry of excess and ostentation. But even more representative of the Hollywood imaginary is Griffith’s failure, the result of hubris of re-creating an ancient city out of wood and plaster just for thirty or so minutes of footage. Griffith’s set serves as the Babylon in Anger’s famous book title and as the cover image for Knopf Doubleday’s reprint of Gore Vidal’s 1990 novel Hollywood. The film and its over-budget production bankrupted Griffith, and as Anger notes, served as a cautionary tale for those working in the industry early on.

“Aria Dean: Facts Worth Knowing,” Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2024

Dean’s decaying minimalism suggests uncanny parallels between this lore of the proverbial Babylon and today’s art world. Château Shatto, the gallery that hosts Dean’s invocation of the structure, is located in the newly gentrified zone of “Melrose Hill” (a name for the area I hadn’t heard until about a year ago), just a few doors down from the pristine white cubes of LA’s David Zwirner complex. In between are cluttered family-owned furniture stores with gaudy brass bed frames, fake art deco mirrors, and vinyl coffee tables. The stores, along with tattoo parlors and seedy bars, have been replaced by sleek cafes and expensive clothing stores. After years of buying property, a young developer, Zach Lasry, son of billionaire Marc Lasry, has begun creating his own sort of Babylon – leasing storefronts to galleries and other high-end retailers. Operating in an increasingly precarious market, smaller and mid-sized galleries are getting as close as they can to a trail of crumbs from blue chips. This Babylon will likely become another ruin within a ruin as such galleries get priced out of the “burgeoning” neighborhood. Dean’s sculptures will be in storage or in a museum or in one of the homes of the sleek cafes’ patrons.

The critique present in the work is subtle, not nearly as direct and biting as it could be, which may be typical of the artist’s style. Dean, in her sculptural practice, is more reserved, maintaining a sleek aesthetic with objects she produces. She’s a young art-world star, though clearly aware of the precarity of that world she finds herself in. She knows it’s one full of bloated characters (like Lasry) stomping through neighborhoods and stampeding through galleries to eat up the hippest young artist. It’s a world that leaves smaller or mid-level galleries no choice but to mimic and follow their higher ups, unable to evade the hold those galleries have on the market. Artists like Aria Dean have the shaky position among it all. Splat – the onomatopoeic word appears in a number of her sculptures’ titles. It’s the sound made by something hitting the ground and being flattened. The sound made by something that is big but flimsy, like a balloon filled with water that’s tossed too high and not caught. Splat and water is everywhere.

“Aria Dean: Facts Worth Knowing,” Château Shatto, Los Angeles, September 14–October 26, 2024.

Gracie Hadland is a writer living in Los Angeles.

Image credit: courtesy the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles, photo Ed Mumford