DECADE Site Project: Subterranean

Subterranean

by Aaron Noble

LOCATION:
Tamarind Institute
2500 Central Ave. SE, Southeast/UNM

516 ARTS welcomed back Los Angeles based artist Aaron Noble to create Subterranean, a temporary mural on the wall of Tamarind Institute (facing Central Avenue behind glass). His work, which can also be seen with his past murals Quantum Bridge on Warehouse 508 at 508 1st Street NW in Downtown and The Cuckoo’s Nest, or, What You Hustlin’, Brother? at 515 Central Avenue NW in EDo), is based on cutting away the narrative and figurative content of superhero comics, and reconfiguring the component parts into autonomous abstract forms which express the deeper psychological poetry encoded within them. Noble says about Subterranean, “To escape the relentless blast of light and heat on Central Avenue, we are sometimes tempted to burrow into the earth, to go spelunking in the desert caves. We pass through magnetic fields, through strata of rock and mineral. Our thoughts turn inward as well. We think of the birth canal, the large intestine. We are inside ourselves. We begin to forget the shape of the outside world. The passage inverts itself. Now the inside is the outside and instead of us climbing through the channel, it is the channel which grips us, pushing us through the void.”

This project was part of a collaboration with Tamarind Institute, for which Aaron Noble will return to Tamarind in 2017 for a printmaking residency.

Made possible with special support from Tamarind Institute

Image: Aaron Noble, Subterranean, 2016