The Renaissance Society, Chicago

The University of Chicago | Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis Ave.
60637 Chicago

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renaissancesociety.org (773) 702-8670 info@renaissancesociety.org

artist / participant

Aria Dean 

press release

25.02.2023 - 16.04.2023

ARIA DEAN
ABATTOIR, U.S.A.!

Abattoir, U.S.A.! surveys the interior of an empty slaughterhouse, which is animated here using Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics tool used to create real-time environments. In Dean’s film, the viewer follows a linear path through an impossible architecture—a seamless combination of 19th, 20th, and 21st century design elements and non-Euclidean spaces rather than a direct model of an existing building. The film is accompanied by an immersive 8-channel score that plays a vital role in developing the film's affective landscape, and its experimentation with the construction and limitations of narrative.

Dean was initially inspired by philosophers Georges Bataille and Frank Wilderson, each of whom address the slaughterhouse in their writings– whether as a metaphor or paradigm– as crucial to the constitution of civil society. Abattoir, U.S.A.!, also builds on Dean’s own research into the slaughterhouse and industrial architecture, and the ways they reveal modernism’s intimacy with death on conceptual, political, and material levels.