Seven Paintings and a House Façade 

The Armory Show | Booth P43

September 6 - 8, 2024

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The way the heart pounds, as if caged in the chest, while music builds during a slasher film; the predictions of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth; the uncanny exterior of Marcel DuChamp’s Étant Donnés—there’s something innately and enduringly thrilling about those ominous signs that one intuits as indicative of an impending, haunting reveal. For his presentation at The Armory Show, Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Jupin seeks out and strings together the dogma that is created between the recurrences of these sorts of visual indicators. With the façade of his childhood house shielding the paintings of culturally and personally allusive iconography within, Jupin takes his viewer on an autobiographically grounded journey through the physical sensations and visual elements of the typology of the horror genre. 

The word “horror” derives, significantly, from the Latin “orur,” which describes the physical sensation of bristling—of one’s hair standing on end. This externalization of feeling in a horror film, according to British critic Robin Wood, stems from the genre’s true subject, “the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses.” That which is monstrous or horrific embodies what we have disallowed within ourselves and subsequently pushed down or away—ultimately, that which we have repressed. 

For the hyper-contemporary art world of Los Angeles in 2024, when it comes to the topic of repression, Mike Kelley still stands paramount—thus, Jupin enters the horror genre by referencing and critically expounding upon Kelley. Jupin addresses Kelley’s concept of nonmemory, for instance, by constructing his childhood home—as Kelley did in Educational Complex (1995). Where Kelley constructs only the spaces he remembers and allows the rest to be omitted, Jupin, in a gesture that feels impacted by the later Information Age and the onslaught of content within post-internet culture, fills his comprehensive space of memory full with versions of self as well as a vast quantity of influential outside forces. 

This exhibition marks the first time that Jupin has ever exhibited self-portraiture. It is of further note that in each instance of self-representation, the artist also includes an element of the otherworldly. This suggests that, within his creations, the artist is a type of horrific figure himself—puppeteering the objects of his apparitions. In Raw Power, Get Around To It (Hold My Bones) (2024) Jupin hangs the likeness of his own face on the handle of a broom—the object most associated with the pinnacle of horror icons, the witch. Jupin also notes that the broom was an important trope for artist Robert Rauschenberg who examined this household object based on its Platonic function, determining it to be either “smart” or “dumb.” 

Jupin questions the Platonic function of his own likeness within the world he’s built from the imagery of other horrific worlds. Perhaps his own image is another trope yet to be discovered. Alternatively, as a sign with less obvious psychological implications, perhaps his presence indicates that he is more than simply an omniscient storyteller or the hand that executes each vignette. Perhaps the artist is also the monster—that which, more so than the other used and reused imagery presented in this selection, must still be determined and understood within the ongoing narrative of Jupin’s oeuvre. 

Text by Christie Hayden