Cynthia Paige Aaron

    There is something in the nature of a certain kind of assemblage work, with a recombination of material plucked or salvaged from the cultural stream, having already enjoyed a life, that can lend such reuse an uncanny quality of the familiar, even when encountering a work for the first time. Like strangers who plague the memory, faces certain we have encountered, assemblage are the doppelgangers of the art world.

    In the case of Cynthia Paige Aaron's work, often this same phenomenon is evoked, in part from the rightness of their structures, of intuitively reincarnated flotsam, but also the curious and odd sensation of a dream that we have both had and yet to have, a sort of deja vu waiting to happen. Ms. Aaron achieves visual harmonies that trigger something in our own internal tuning fork: we have been this way before, in a fugue state, perhaps; unexpectedly familiar landmarks previously half glimpsed of a summer evening, sleepwalking and trying to get to our destination.

    They are lots from an unadvertised estate sale of the fantastic. Their mystery reminds us we ought to pay attention a little bit more to the objects of our world around us, lest they pass, and our only recourse to eulogize them once it is too late.

    They never beg to be looked at. They ask nothing of us. They are indifferent to our presence, unlike other works in other forms that cry out to be appreciated. It is we who wonder what we might offer in their presence, we self-conscious voyeurs in the company of effortlessly more interesting conversationalists than we could hope to be.

    The trappings of their ritual is nakedly on display, in language and flow beyond the limited natural order and staged reality of things we believe we are fluent in, yet somehow know we are blandly of limited understanding and imagination. We are curious before the enigmatic Darwinism of the pieces Ms. Aaron re/conjures into being, likely channeling them like a surgeon's assistant, (taking, following) verbal coaching from the specialist as she operates on his brain. Though they do not stare back, we sense the pieces discreetly aware of us, quietly awaiting our departure, so as to resume their state of play or natural discourse.

    These are too noble, too vulnerable and neurotic and proud to be zombies, yet it is as if the hardware stores of ghost towns, tool cemeteries, forgotten child's nurseries, sporting goods and telegraph offices were bathed in a light surrealistic and metaphysical, and the creatures on display arose from the clotted earth and flaked paint and rusted funereal mounds to reassemble as they are today. Ms. Aaron serves as undertaker, actuary and artist-alchemist. Her charges live again, for however many years they may have left. The only logical last stop after this final resurrected glory, oblivion, once and for all.

    We sense that we have experienced and been experienced.

Evan Carlson, October 2011