Aaron Aujla “Apartment Alteration Paintings”

The National Exemplar

This event has ended.

The National Exemplar is pleased to announce its new exhibition by Aaron Aujla: “Apartment Alteration Paintings”

“Apartment Alteration Paintings,” is a continuation of Aaron Aujla’s investigation into the behaviors and furnishings that help define the way we live.

Previously, Aujla has transformed a Belgian gallery into a vacation rental for his 2013 exhibition “1BR/1BA on Avenue Louise” in response to AirBnB’s proliferating design ethos. By functionally altering the purpose for visiting the gallery, many passed through the venue without realizing they had just traversed the installation itself, which, by all appearances, reflected a warm inviting place to stay while visiting Brussels. In “Best Judgment,” the artist altered the window treatments of an Upper East Side gallery to mirror a view across the street. By using vinyl shades and sheer fabric supported by a pine board armature replicating the windows across the street, Aujla proposed a sculpture that conveyed two stories, the first being an illusion for the exterior and the other an intervention into the gallery’s interior space. For “Divorce Sculpture,” 2015, Aujla explored how objects hold and transfer emotion. In a discrete gesture of exchange, countertops from home remodeling projects of divorcees were installed in the gallery while exact replicas were reinstalled at the original locations. With “Library Desk At The University Of Punjab,” 2016, the artist hired 10 fiber artisans to employ traditional Indian weaving techniques in recreating carpets produced by factories in India today.

Recently, the artist has engaged in amateur renovation and restoration projects as an interior designer. Between December 2016 and April 2017, Aujla made alterations to his own apartment based on this exploration, including: a notch in the wall to accommodate a piece of furniture, a pine board closet system, and a bamboo window treatment.

Taking cues from the work of Walter Gay (1856-1937), Aujla has made oil paintings to serve as a record of these actions. Gay “…proffered several reasons for turning to small-scale interior images. He felt that these works enabled him to be more personal in his art, express his ‘sentiment for the past’ and evoke ‘the spirit of empty rooms.’ “[1] Just as Gay, preferred an antiquated medium to represent his rooms, Aujla borrows from the same tradition, rendering his subtle design acts in oil rather than a more documentarian medium like photography. French-born, London-based artist, Marc Camille Chaimowicz suggests that the preference for an empty room in design publications today is to present a space “…free of occupants…(which) enables the readers the better to project themselves into the range of aspirational fantasies. The exception is that of artists’ homes which invariably feature the artist. It is as though these are seen either as extensions of their work or might in some fashion elucidate insight.”[2]

The means that Aujla adopts in his wide-ranging practice extends from photography to text and now to painting. Beginning with a location-based action, each work in “Apartment Alteration Paintings” offers insight into the artist’s most personal investigations to date - 191 Henry Street, NY.

Aaron Aujla (b. 1986, Victoria, Canada) received his BA from the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 2006. His work has been shown internationally at such galleries as CLEARING and Quincaillerie Vander Eycken, Brussels, Belgium; Carlier Gebauer, Berlin, Germany; Paradise Row, London, UK; Art: Concept, Paris, France; Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy; Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; David Peterson Gallery, Minneapolis; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; The Journal, Brooklyn; Martos and KA

[1] Isabel L. Taube, Walter Gay’s Poetic Rooms (New York: Frick Art & Historical Center, 2012), 40.
[2] Marc Camille Chaimowicz, The World of Interiors (Zurich; The migros museum fur gegenwartskunst, 2007), 7.