Rachel Ara, winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2016, has been awarded a . Created for pioneering artists, the programme facilitates new research and the realisation of聽bold ideas to make sense of technology in everyday life. With the support, Ara aims to research and build聽a complex sculpture聽using multiple techniques and technologies that will interrogate their own function and engage the audience. Her piece will incorporate classic techniques such as carving as well as new avenues such as virtual reality 鈥 crossing the borders into illusion.
Ara won the Aesthetica Art Prize (AAP) in 2016 with This Much I鈥檓 Worth, a self颅-evaluating artwork that continually displays its own sale value. The installation sources its value from the internet, assisted by complex data mining algorithms called 鈥渢he endorsers.鈥 Constructed with materials that resonate with the sex trade and the art world, it seeks to question the values we place on both objects and people: who has the right to apportion these values? Ara has since been working on a large-scale version of the AAP winning piece, pushing the concept further into new dimensions and conceptualised development. The latest version is larger at 4m x 2m and incorporates 80 pieces of neon, built with redundant server room equipment, IP cameras聽and digital aspects.
As Ara notes, in the Aesthetica Future Now Anthology: “The new piece is on a much larger scale because people expect a spectacle, and I suppose in a sense I am giving it to them. It鈥檚 about being taken seriously, creating an impact and a reference to the machismo of the large scale sculpture, responding to the art institution鈥檚 desire. I wanted to see if its size would create more chatter on the internet, for the algorithms to pick up and increase the price.”
Having exhibited the piece at Anise Gallery, London, as part of the collaborative exhibition Controlled Realities, the work is now being taken to the Electronic Visulation and Arts Conference (EVA) and the V&A鈥檚 Digital Futures: Lumen Big Reveal at Hackney House in July. A larger collection of Ara鈥檚 pieces are also on display at Vane Gallery, Newcastle, as part of Queering Minimalism this July.
To see more of Rachel Ara鈥檚 work, visit
To enter the Aesthetica Art Prize, visit聽
To pick up a copy of the Future Now Anthology:聽
Credits:
1. Rachel Ara, This Much I’m Worth. Courtesy of the artist.
