Cida de Aragon, Uncharted Territories
Cida de Aragon, Pervasive Surveillance, 3D Animation still, Giclee print, 47.25” x 86.61” 2022.
Cida de Aragon, Uncharted Territories at The Studio, Las Vegas
by D.K. Sole
When Las Vegas based artist Cida de Aragon described the ideas behind her oeuvre at the reception for Uncharted Territories, it finally became clear to me that she had been concentrating on one central theme for years. The appearance of her works (shifting from static photographs of casino signs to pulsating animated reptilian eyes a few years later) was an effort to find some visible thing that would correspond to her preoccupation with the invisible world.
She must have tried to explain all of this to me before, years ago, but it didn’t click until I saw her latest body of work in this show, Echoes of Annihilation. Why that one? Because it abstracted the real world more dramatically than any of the others? Maybe it needed to become visually obvious to me that there was a split between what she saw and what we saw–my job, as a viewer, was to recognise the gap. Annihilation was centered on columnar sheaths of digitally-generated lava surging up in perpetual loops on vertical TV monitors. Animated data from atomic test sites, she said. I wondered if I had seen the bomb portrayed like that before. The other depictions I could think of were visually realistic in some way, the artists working with photographs or film–images of mushroom clouds, Eric LoPresti’s watercolour paintings of bomb craters, Robert Beckmann’s toppled dummies, Emmet Gowin’s Test Site series, or collages that included that well-travelled 1957 photo of Lee Merlin, Miss Atomic Bomb, an easy satirical joke, a healthy woman throwing her arms in the air, celebrating her society’s unstable control over death and violence. Echoes of Annihilation bypassed all that. It wasn’t trying to convince me (or itself) that the tests had happened, that they were shocking to look at, that they were awe-inspiring, or even that they were historically unusual.
Cida de Aragon, Echoes of Annihilation 3, 4, 5, 3D Animation still, Giclee print 47.25” x 86.61,” 2024.
Energy, she said.
The eyes, the signs, and the atomic blasts were all representations of energy: oh, that made sense. Energy was the key. This energy was just there. It was normal, it had been channeled in this particular way, in a bomb, in these patterns. It could have been anything else. A turtle, a mountain, the moon, whatever. All of the manifestations of energy she had chosen had something irresistible about them. Casino signs, eyes … We say someone is looking “at” you. We talk about sight as if it’s projected irresistibly outwards, independently approaching us. de Aragon had emphasized the surveilling potency of the animated eyes by making the scales around them shoot in and out like groping tentacles. Look (she said to me in person at the reception): her 3D wall piece made from lenticular pictures of eyes represented only a tiny fraction of the digital tentacle field in just one frame of these images. Tiny! But the piece itself was huge. It took up the whole wall. In my imagination I saw all of the large gallery papered with these moving eyes and realised it would still not be enough to fully represent the unending energy she wanted to depict.
Then what would be enough? I tried to picture her dilemma. How do you make an artwork about energy that is not energy itself? The TV monitors can hint at perpetual motion but they have boundaries. They’re x-number inches high and wide and whatever. Plus, you know you can turn them off. That knowledge is always there when you look at a monitor. So what do you do? Take a further step into conceptual artwork? Something that focuses on its own innate inability to present itself, like Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series from the ‘60s? Was the next step an actual explosion? But that would connect the energy to just one thing, and ultimately her subject was energy freed from explosions or the chemical reactions in neon signs, or sight-tentacles. There has to be something that would indicate that freedom. I don’t know what I’d do, honestly. The test site project is unfinished, she said: she’s still working on it.
Cida de Aragon, 300 Vigilant Eyes, Parametric Sculpture wit 300 lenticular eye photos. 55 CNC cut pieces, 300 custom 3D printed parts. 2022.
Cida de Aragon
Uncharted Territories
The Studio, Sahara West Library, Las Vegas
December 13, 2024 - February 22, 2025
Photos courtesy the artist.
Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on May 12, 2025.