The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

contra la pared brings together a selection of Segal’s sculpture, video, furniture, and textile works to create an environment that resonates with both the familiar and the disquieting. The title, which can mean both “against the wall” or “cornered” in Spanish, references allusions in the artist’s work to domestic surfaces, such as wallpaper, as well as the feelings of insecurity and entrapment that interior spaces can provoke. The exhibition will include Inland, an animated video trilogy that juxtaposes the sensual—yet ominous—unfolding of patterned wall surfaces and window-like apertures against a soundtrack of fragmented phrases from language tutorials—in both English and Spanish—and texts from classic fairy tales, such as Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs.

Carpets in the exhibition ooze from underneath walls, while others unravel upwards to suggest flight; a series of benches and a wall of objects resembling books sprout tonguelike appendages and erotic puckers that violate their normal geometry. Segal’s childhood in Argentina was formed to a large extent by the uncertainty and anxiety of living under the authoritarian military dictatorship. This experience left her with complex feelings about the safety and security of domestic space, since her home had acted as both protector and prison. Moving to New York City in 1999, the artist was struck by the fact that, unlike the thick, sound-deadening masonry walls of her youth in Buenos Aires, walls in New York are permeable membranes that permit the outside world to enter, engendering a fluid sense of interior and exterior. contra la pared is a metaphorical compendium of Segal’s experiences, revealing her deft ability to manipulate both form and materials, and thus shift and amplify meaning.

Analia Segal (b. 1967, Rosario, Argentina) received her BA from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1997 and her MA from New York University in 2001. Segal received a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and was a Guggenheim Fellow. Her recent solo and group exhibitions include Opus Project Space, New York; Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse University, NY; Heimbold Visual Art Center’s Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo del Barrio, New York; Triennale Design Museum, Milan, Italy; and MoMA PS1, New York. A major book on Segal’s work El interior del interior, published in Argentina in 2017, includes a comprehensive survey of eighteen years of her interdisciplinary investigations into the possibilities of both the process and the mediums of art making. Segal lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

A full-color, soft-cover scholarly publication will be available during the exhibition.

Organized by Richard Klein, exhibitions director, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.