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.
Sugar Town is Darya Diamond's second solo exhibition with Sebastian Gladstone, the artistic focus rests in the tension between form and formlessness. In this way, Diamond is akin to a psychopomp: she ferries us between realms, taking our hand in hers and leading us briefly into the denominationless divine.
Sugartown revisits the theme of sex work, a topic which has anchored Diamond's practice in recent years. But here, the artist's eyes are cast skyward. Sugartown is a liminal space: a lookout on the way from the corporeal to the celestial, a layover between sacred and profane. There is an almost psychic pulse to the exhibition.
This is work about work. Diamond questions labor's (in)visibility, its transformative capacity, its relation to the body, and the body's relation to the soul. To borrow a phrase from Camille Paglia, Sugartown "zaps with pornographic intensity, generating electricity through the friction of opposing ideas and the confrontational clang of its imagery.
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