Darya Diamond (b. 1991) is a Mexican-American artist working across print, sculpture, audio and film. She explores literal and symbolic figurations of the body as a primordial workplace.
Her practice is ritually and theoretically rooted in methods of reproduction, regenerating and renegotiating the promise of transactional intimacy, care, and invisible labour through moldmaking, casting, and printmaking. Utilizing cast forms, religious iconography and pornography, Diamond’s work is a portrait of the body as a site of mutual aid, power, pleasure, and labour.
Diamond received her MFA from Goldsmiths University of London, and her BA from Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Her work has been featured internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions at Sebastian Gladstone, Piloto Pardo, Pippy Houldsworth, Saatchi Gallery, Tree Art Museum and more.
Judgement Proof situates the American motel as both landscape and cultural signifier, drawing parallels between its mythology of anonymity, pleasure and escape and the forms of labour that sustain bodily existence. The work subverts the mythology of sex work by placing its contradictions within the motel fantasy itself, where intimacy, transaction and anonymity become difficult to separate.
Rather than rupturing the association between prostitution and the hotel, Judgement Proof destabilises it, exposing the motel as a space in which fantasy and labour, performance and familiarity, are continually negotiated.
The motels in which the work was filmed are decaying landscapes within a decaying country, yet retain a particular charm through their outdatedness. The motel operates simultaneously as an escape from reality and a reminder of its material conditions, a space of loneliness and transactional familiarity where the fantasy of anonymity is inseparable from the labour required to maintain it.
The motel operates simultaneously as an escape from reality and a reminder of its material conditions, a space of loneliness and transactional familiarity where the fantasy of anonymity is inseparable from the labour required to maintain it.
For three quarters of a century, New Contemporaries has supported emerging and early career artists with exhibitions, mentoring, residencies, public programming and opportunities to develop and share new work. Based in the heart of central London and working across a national network of grassroots and artist-led organisations, they connect artists, audiences and institutions to present a wider picture of contemporary art across the UK.
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