PRACTICE

Born

Pittsburg, PA, 1963

Education

Ohio State University (BFA), 1981-1985 (MFA), 1988-1990

– uses basic outlines to make his installations, sculptures, and images. Arie marks fields and courts with nonsensical lines and asks audiences to spontaneously agree upon the rules of a game. Wondering how we agree to function together while in good-humored combat, why, and what tips it over the edge into ugliness. Also, by mashing up different sports, such as tennis or soccer, he links the economic symbolism and reality of middle-class sports to the financial history of Dresden. Other works include live streaming the audio coverage of Wimbledon over Dresden’s derelict tennis courts, and asking Dresden residents to remember a destroyed local grocery through drawing floor plans. He then averaged the recollections into a new floor plan that will be placed over the unused site in the summer of 2027.  

– inquires how we decide on rules, on structure to life and hobbies, on how we opt to memorize these rules and then, fatefully, how they distort in each of us. Individual histories mangle even the most basic shared ideas and spaces, and what they represent. From a sports field’s chalk lines to their symbol as an economic reality, floorplan structures do more than organize. They refine what we will agree on, what we will try to get away with, and the passion they induce from seemingly nowhere.