Friday, 9/15
event from 8pm-11pm;
1st showing at 8pm, 2nd showing at 9pm
$3 suggested donation

Mask wearing is highly recommended indoors. N/95, KN/95, surgical masks suggested and provided.

“In Search of Diana of Ephesus” is an examination of the patriarchy as the bedrock of extractive capitalism. Diana of Ephesus, originally from Ephesus, Turkiye, is the goddess of abundance and fertility. She originally donned, what we believe to be, dozens of bull testicles against her chest. These ornaments allowed the goddess to be situated within both the masculine and feminine, giving her the multiple parts needed to create life on Earth. The Romanization of this goddess turned her testicles into breasts, thus altering our understanding of the goddess as purely “feminine”. She is often referred to as Mother Nature- commonly depicted as a lactating fountain. The representative figure is put into a constant, cyclical action of feeding - giving. This action mirrors our current relationship to the Earth and labor, both considered feminine within the patriarchy. Extractive capitalism condones a constant taking from our bodies and natural resources, and sets up the superstructures that make it harder for us to function outside of it- both in our external lives as well as our intimate lives.
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This work puts into question my(our) own relationship to misogyny and the patriarchy. It is a reflection on my attempts to step outside of this gaze, only to find myself within it again. Am I approaching the liberatory? Or am I too stuck in these systems to get out?

Aryana Polat is a multidisciplinary artist whose work moves through sculpture, video, and performance in order to convey her observations of our current practice of extractive capitalism. Filtered through her lens as an Iranian-American, Polat dissects this economic system- and its global spread via American cultural and economic hegemony- in order to understand how it affects the body, Earth, and its natural resources. In tandem, she is invested in using art to preserve her family and cultural history, while simultaneously observing the ways she is losing her spiritual connections, culture, mother tongue, and, with the loss of more generations, a tether to her origins. Polat is interested in the contradictory as a reflection between forces; where the exploitative meets the liberatory, the opulent meets the deprived, and where the tangible meets the ephemeral.

Polat was a 2022 Franconia Sculpture Park Emerging Artist in Residence, and was nominated to attend the Yale: Norfolk School of Art summer residency in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout Los Angeles, New England, and online. She is currently based in her hometown of Los Angeles, CA, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021 with a BFA in Sculpture.

Flyer designed by Serena Shen <3