ISN’T IT ICONIC? “What happens if you take an object and make a slight change to it in a different space? How does it fit in relation to the original? Is it a copy, or is it new and different? Which is also a larger question that art has always asked.” These are the questions artist and curator Aria Dean ’15 is asking with her piece Ironic Ionic Replica , a to-scale, paper replica of the wooden column that architect Robert Venturi installed 10
as part of his addition to the Allen Memorial Art Museum. In an interview with Becky Akinyode in the online architecture magazine PIN-UP, Dean described the Venturi piece at Oberlin as “a totem for a time when I was
consumed with architectural theory, which led me to conceptual and minimal art from the 20th century, work that still consumes me.” Dean’s Ironic Ionic Replica was part of the Hammer Museum’s
biennial exhibition Made in L.A. 2020: a version , which took place last summer in Los Angeles at the Hammer and at the Huntington, a library, art museum, and botanical garden, where the work is pictured here.
JOSHUA WHITE
Thought Process