Soledad Arias (1959-2020) was an artist whose practice incorporated the word as a concrete form in the context of human relations. She used a range of media including text, prints, drawing, neon light, and installation.
Arias was born in Buenos Aires. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York where she completed her B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees and remained in New York to make work that deals with the material and immaterial aspects and the impact of words. Her white neon signs are like ghosts of lingering thoughts that seem to go unspoken. The phrases are pointed statements that reference an indirect interaction with the viewers, either commenting on an emotional reaction or a physical presence.
Arias explored the materiality of text as well as its poetic, phonetic, and visual dimensions within the context of dialog and vernacular communication. Her work induces an element of interactivity and viewer participation by constructing open-ended narratives through text and linguistic elements responding to a number of parallel narratives. For example, her work White lies – constructed with white neon tubing and written out in cursive text – hovers on the wall surrounded by a white halo as it plays with the actual meaning of the words. It refers to a white, or trivial, lie that someone tells another to avoid hurting their feelings – positioning the viewer in an awkward zone of both comfort and anxiety. Closed-captioned lullaby evokes the memory of a familiar sound and acts as a link between past and present.
Arias’s work has been exhibited at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Jersey City Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Alejandra von Hartz gallery in Miami, articule gallery in Montreal, El Museo del Barrio in New York, The Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, among others.
