Dahlia Bloomstone: Bath__w@ter__4__sale
Inspired by the 20th century conceptualist Piero Manzoni’s Merde d’artista or Artist’s Shit and famed internet personality Belle Delphine’s controversial video streams, Dahlia Bloomstone’s Bath__w@ter__4__sale integrates pastiche iterations of their most famous public acts while interrogating the presumed high/low cultural hierarchy that separates the two artists in the public imagination. Manzoni’s gesture of bottling and selling his own human excrement was hailed as high conceptualism, earning him a historical position as one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers. Delphine’s candy-colored performances often include anime-inspired erotic costumes, overt sex acts, and most famously, jarring and selling her own bathwater, a moment that earned Delphine volumes of notoriety and social-media followers, as well as harsh criticism over, what some perceived as, the child-like qualities of her appearance.
Originally working as a video artist, Dahlia Bloomstone’s practice has come to include animation, sculpture, code, dance, film, sound, performance, and, most importantly, programming, designing, and conceptualizing her own video games, often examining the impact of technology and internet culture on contemporary social relations. The gamer girl aesthetic plays a prominent role in her frequent engagement with internet subcultures, including the fairly recent emergence of online trends permeated by neo-misogyny that simultaneously worship, patronize, and vilify female-identifying figures and iconography. Bloomstone’s coquettish and somewhat vulnerable IRL & physical persona amplifies this contradiction, utilizing a playful symbology that extends to her own coy, darkly ironic, avatar-like commodified persona probing at issues of economics, power, sex, the language that emerges from online censorship, and gender in America today. While conscious of the importance of the feminist art-historical lineage in such artists as Barbara Krueger or Andrea Fraser, a primary focus of Bloomstone’s work relates to the recent transformation to global economic labor systems and how specifically sex work has been purposefully promoted as both a morally questionable and a necessary part of emerging online industries – most financial institutions, like PayPal, will not allow these transactions, leading to Belle Delphine never earning money from her bathwater sales. While humor and seduction play a central role in Bloomstone’s practice, ultimately her work highlights uncertainties about value acquisition in a contemporary economy where technology has devoured many conventional forms of labor production. Closely examining the sex work economy, the muddled distinctions between sex and other forms of entertainment, and the preponderance of online marketplaces that cater to sexual consumption, Bloomstone’s work implores questions about who has the power to legitimize some types of labor over others, if there is a limit, with regard to an increasingly immaterial economy, to the separation of labor from value, and at what point do we decide, regardless of our industry, when we’re all being gamified.
Dahlia Bloomstone (b.1995) is a Puerto Rican/American artist and Hunter College MFA (NY, 2022) graduate with a BFA from Bard College (NY, 2018). Bloomstone has exhibited with Hauser & Wirth (NY), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), Rhizome (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (NY), Do Not Research (NY), CICA Museum (ROK), Hyacinth Gallery (NY), and Mass Gallery (TX), among others. She is the recipient of the SPCUNY Actionist grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Master’s Thesis grant from Hunter College, the Ox-Bow CIP scholarship, and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. She has participated in residencies through the School of Visual Arts, Ox-Bow, and Foreign Objekt and recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was a Teaching Assistant at Hunter College from 2020-2022 and a Visiting Artist/Professor at UT Austin in 2023. At present, she is an LMCC resident on Governor's Island and a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow at Theater Mitu. She is currently a founding member of New Uncanny Gallery in Harlem, and she will attend the Whitney Independent Study program in the Fall of 2024. This is her second performance at Hyacinth Gallery.
