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. Utlizing 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.
Sebastian Gladstone is pleased to present Primordial Workplace, a solo exhibition of sculptures, prints, and mixed media work by London-based artist Darya Diamond. Diamond's practice is rooted in methods of reproduction, and the re-appropriation of ready-made materials to propose the body as a site of care, power, pleasure, and labor.
The reproduction of invisible labor, such as sex work, is a political gesture whose visual language is almost entirely derived from the contexts in which the artist's labor occurs. Through personal surveillance footage, pornography stills, and the reproduction of items used in in-person sessions, the artist implicates these artifacts of pleasure into a new context of intimacy and care.
Bedsheets taken from her sessions with clients have been used, printed, and titled after the hotel they originate from. Formally, the sheets present visibility for an otherwise obscured labor sector, as art objects, they emerge at a juncture between the erotic and the banal. For the artist, it is important to represent the contradictory subjectivity of the hotel fantasy, and also of the labourers who vindicate that fantasy.
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