Ariella Robinson

Statement

If the modernist photographer’s job was to organize the world into a series of images, the job of the contemporary photographer is to mediate the world as a series of images, and to translate their understanding as such. Working in and around photography, fibers, research, text, and archival methodologies my practice superimposes the personal and the political and aims to develop a language with the ephemeral.

GlogauAIR Project

This body of work was informed by the life and work of German language, Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan, who described his writings articulating the trauma of the post-War era as an effort in becoming silent.

Textiles trace the boundaries between our external and internal worlds— curtains, clothes, blankets are instruments for assessing self and all the rest. By engaging with the laden histories of labor and domesticity found in quilting, I ask myself an increasingly difficult question— what is it to be an American?

When my body feels suspended between digital and material worlds, when my devices alert me that the permafrost is melting, that a democratically elected legislator deems that the solution to gun violence is more guns, all while I’m taking a picture of my butt in new pants, I wonder, where do we end and where does the rest of the world begin? Why does it feel so good to take selfies and pix of the sunset. What will happen to all of our photographs of flowers and fireworks when we die. Where will we find enough silence to avoid the circuitous nature of history amidst the cacophony of the present.

CV Summary

Exhibitions

• Introductions. Root Division. San Francisco. 2021
• Little Ritual. Gallery 16. San Francisco. 2021
• Peace (Nine Artists Consider Kiki Gallery). Delaplane. San Francisco. 2020
• State of Us. Nexus Gallery. San Francisco. 2019
• San Francisco Art Book Fair. Minnesota Street Project. 2018
• San Francisco Art Institute BFA Show. Diego Rivera Gallery. 2018
• A Cloud Passed Over. Paul Sack Gallery. San Francisco. 2018
• Stories Told. Still Lights Gallery. San Francisco. 2018
• If Opposites Are Equal. Diego Rivera Gallery. San Francisco, CA. 2018.
• The Impracticals. Bass and Reiner Gallery. San Francisco. 2017
• It’s Complicated. 511 Pop Up. San Francisco. 2017
• Working Title. Real Old Paper Gallery. San Francisco. 2017
• Earthquake Weather. Paul Sack Gallery. San Francisco. 2017
• Three’s A Crowd. San Francisco Art Institute. San Francisco. 2017
• The Sunset is Also Impossible. San Francisco Art Institute. San Francisco. 2017
• Elvis Going. Paul Sack Gallery. 2016
• Signal: Noise. The Convent. San Francisco. 2016
• A Particular Kind of Haunting. Still Lights Gallery. San Francisco. 2015
• Art’s Not Dead. The Convent . San Francisco. 2015
• Memory Meat. The Red Victorian. San Francisco. 2015

Press

• 27 Years Later, Nine Artists Consider Kiki Gallery—Within its Same Walls

Gallery