Arden Cone’s work hinges on unraveling the complexities of the American feeling. In theory, the privilege to enlist in its ethos, to belong to its nationhood, rests only on one’s allegiance to a few seminal intangibles: democracy, freedom, justice, and liberty. History has shown, however, that there are hazards to a promise founded on the formless.

High Crimes as Misdemeanors investigates how these aspirational ideals actually play out in American culture— and the violence that occurs when they falter. The work’s inherent contradictions capture the nation’s disorienting relationship with aggression, mirroring the ways in which violence is alternately criticized, sensationalized, glamorized, and seized for political gain in America. 

The United States is a land beset by gun violence, yet Cone chooses to portray brass knuckles, a similarly lethal, yet most often illegal weapon. By doing so, she sidesteps politicized imagery while positing ethical questions about weapons, more generally.

Within these works, conceptual gravitas meets a highly approachable— even playful— aesthetic. Rendered as items of paper, the weapons appear fragile and nonthreatening, despite being metaphorically loaded. The objects surrounding them direct their meaning: they are a conflation of aggression and patriotism; they are symptoms of toxic masculinity, they are instruments for woman’s self-defense; they are a false sense of security. 

Within the context of a society that rewards aggression at the expense of nuance, Cone’s works become a subversive force. Rooted in quiet activism, their wit and whimsy serve to jam the gears of the feedback loop, offering silence in the face of incessant noise. 

Up in Arms: Subversive Art for a Nation on Guard

Arden Cone spoke with with curator and writer Tyler Emerson-Dorsch for a conversation at Little Animals. The two discussed how carefully-chosen imagery and aesthetic can subvert expectations and foster dialogue on gridlocked issues of social justice.

The inquiry into Cone’s work touched on how she employs wit, whimsy, and play as avenues to investigate the aggressive affect that has permeated American culture and politics. 

Tyler Emerson- Dorsch is a curator and writer. She was a partner at Emerson Dorsch, a contemporary art Gallery in Miami. She has a masters degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She is a board member of the AIRIE.Foundation and the Asheville Art Museum. She lives in Western North Carolina, where she and her husband Brook Dorsch have launched Emerson Dorsch Artist Residency, a retreat rooted in landscape, learning and experimentation.

The United States of America occupies a liminal space, both sides and all of the threshold between what defines it and what defies it. We are a tract of land, a group of people, and a set of founding political documents; we are as many interpretations as can be had of each.

Dream, America includes works by six American artists who question national identity by looking into the shared history that binds and divides our country. These artists speak from diverse perspectives, with their individual life experiences forming the vantage points from which they conduct their own investigations. In their artistic explorations, they all bump up against the same issue: the accepted narratives that pass for American history are incomplete, inaccurate and altogether dangerous. They are also rife with opportunity for change.

History has the last word, but the bold and conscientious works within Dream, America show that it is always up for reexamination. The much-needed pause, the patient look into the American psyche, detonates. Suddenly the past that the nation has so carefully kept is blown wide open.

An act of defiance turned experiment in democracy, the United States of America is a contradiction at work. While its founding documents rest in the National Archives, absolute and immutable, the checks and balances they outline exist as mere principles, susceptible to the whims of change. Such ethereal constructs make for an unstable foundation; yet, it is from these democratic ideals that America’s belief system came to be. Dream, America brings together six American artists to investigate this creed in a highly charged moment, each one considering their homeland through the lens of its historical record.

The nation’s past has seen an outsized history of injustices—the genocide of America’s indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans and African Americans, the continuous disenfranchisement of immigrants, and the worsening hold of the patriarchy over women’s rights—and these events have been recorded by the privileged, the proprietors, and oftentimes the perpetrators. The resulting archive is the very root of our current-day fight to control the historical record. Whoever is at the helm of history, whoever controls the narrative, swings the tide of politics in the here and now.

Though the nation’s archive is highly contested and evermore divisive, the artists in Dream, America speak to what is shared: our longing to repair the fractures within it. In doing so, they bring accountability to the front and center.

Across a variety of media, the six artists unpack the inherited cultural conditioning within race relations, ethnicity, gender, spirituality, and the legacy of colonialism in America. Each work is an offering to viewers, an opportunity to explore America’s past in order to expand its future.

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Across the two bodies of work in this exhibition, Arden Cone demonstrates an apprehensive longing to investigate trauma, both individual and collective, from the once-removed vantage point of history.

Through her prints and wall-mounted sculptures, she resuscitates nearly discarded farm materials from various states of decay, asserting their significance by elevating them to the realm of art. The objects’ deteriorated exteriors point to decades of trauma, but Cone leaves the stories of such omitted. As they transcend from object to artwork, evermore-abstracted assumptions of their histories take hold.

Historical memory within America’s socio-political culture is similarly obscured. Cone’s paintings, like her sculptures, employ history to buffer between past traumas and present states on a collective level. America’s biased, incomplete, and highly contested historical record has become divisive rather than shared, accounting for much of the chaos in contemporary politics and beyond. Cone’s works, windows into past and present moments of trauma, compulsively consider memory as an ever-changing archive, always up for reevaluation.

Time’s Witness: Works by Arden Cone and Millicent Kennedy offers a deep and sometimes dark look into humanity by way of the objects we utilize, attach to, and eventually discard.

The found objects referenced or incorporated into this exhibition, resurrected from near disposal and raised into cultural significance, have outlived their intended use by years, or even decades.

Time’s Witness speaks to history in relation to human artifacts, investigating what they alone, or we as a society, have weathered. Both artists acknowledge memory, and even trauma, by way of its touch upon objects, people, and societies.

Through careful recording, obsessive documentation, and laborious artmaking processes, Millicent and Arden delve into the narratives told through the traces we leave behind.