Soledad Arias

The artist´s work explores the materiality of the text, as well as its poetic meanings, its visual aspects and its phonetics in the context of dialogue and colloquial communication. In Four, thirty-three (2011) the composition quotes the piece by John Cage bearing the same name. This piece by Cage features environmental sounds during four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The artist exhibits his reading of Cage’s composition in a short, straight line of white neon light. In Phonetic neon [ha] (2012), Arias records the exclamation "ha" and transcribes it in white neon in the form of a sound wave that represents the phonetic structure of the word. The series Annotations (2011) presents diagrams with staging instructions for imaginary representations. The piece provides only those primordial elements of a narrative; the viewer is abandoned to the construction of the plot based on these central clues. In relation to this last piece, Snippets (2009-2010) consists in graphic representations of the artist’s voice cadence during monologues. The series Acoustic wall (2011-2012) is composed of a series of printed phrases in vinyl, such as “ she whispers to herself”, “faint pause” or “gasps for air”. The phrases are organized on a wall, constructing the narrative on the basis of the rhythm and the content of the text.
Soledad Arias’s work is based on the work of John Cage, as well as on a movement of artists who work in the intersections between sound, art and technology. Soledad Arias was born in Buenos Aires and currently lives and works in New York City. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has shown her works internationally in galleries and museums, among them, MoMA’s PS1 (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), the Jersey City Museum (New Jersey), the Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), El Museo del Barrio (New York) and the Bronx Museum of Arts (New York).