“I can imagine a future where touch and textures, outside of screens
and consoles, become almost illicit or fetishistic.” —Dalia Amara

Selenas Mountain is proud to announce the debut New York solo exhibition of American-Jordanian visual artist Dalia Amara. This is the inaugural exhibition at the gallery’s new Manhattan location, relocating from the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens after 5 years in operation. The work in Control Alter Shift imagines beauty in a future post-identity and post-human world where our consciousness and connectedness is more reliant on virtual than physical forms, and we project ourselves as avatars to each other.

For her solo exhibition, Dalia Amara presents a selection of photographs that imbue the gallery with a phantasmagoria of images, printed by dye sublimation on aluminum. The artist immerses the viewer in a realm of repulsion and dark desire, stating “My work is heavily influenced by my interest in science-fiction, body horror, the codes of femininity in printed beauty advertisements from my adolescence, and my multi-cultural background that makes my identity fluid and liminal.”

The artist uses aesthetic conventions from commercial photo styling and special effects to transform objects and her own body in her photographs. These enticing stagings are constructed using art supplies, commercial beauty supplies, and a host of everyday objects. The dystopian environments feel abjectly alien, where objects and limbs are peculiarly anthropomorphized. The backgrounds of the images are often white or black with subjects occasionally backlit to reflect our interaction with, and the flattening of, information through screens.

In the photograph Cosmetic Serums, the artist’s hand is seen reflected in a mirror with black acrylic nails and a heap of cosmetic goop. The inversion and mirroring of the hands, combined with the stalagmite mounds of cosmetic serum, creates an illusion of a portal to another dimension. In Cat Eye #2, the artist constructs a hauntingly beautiful composition out of flower petals, fast beauty products, and a taxidermy cat eye. Instead of applying products for beautification, the artist reappropriates the promise of ‘the make-over’, and deftly unravels societal beauty standards. Amara’s images direct our focus to question our individual experience with aesthetics, beauty, and mortality within a moment that has no before and no after.

About the Artist
Dalia Amara (b. 1988, Illinois) is an American-Jordanian visual artist working in photography, video, performance, and sculpture. Dalia was raised in the USA, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and UAE. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Dalia has exhibited, screened, and lectured in the USA, Canada, and online at White Columns, Gallery 44, Selena Gallery, MOUNTAIN, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Her work has been written about or featured in The New Yorker, Observer, Artnet News, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, and Precog Magazine. She participated in the Surf Point Foundation Artist Residency in York, Maine.