Visual artist, Dahlia Bloomstone visited NYAP last week for an artist talk and studio visits with NYAP Studio Residents.

Dahlia Bloomstone (b.1995) is a Puerto Rican/American artist and Hunter College MFA (NY, 2022) graduate with a BFA from Bard College (NY, 2018). Dahlia has developed a body of work rooted in video, which has evolved to encompass animation, video games, sculpture, code, dance, film, sound, and performance. However, her focus for the past two years has been on video games. Dahlia addresses and reconciles representations of domesticity, joy, social value, and mutual aid, often through the lens of specific modes of affective labor. With humor, vulnerability, and political urgency, she surveys the technologies and ecologies around the social value and social implications of sexual commerce and investigates the paradigm shifts in these economies. In her practice, Dahlia is especially interested in conjugating the surrealities of SW, dumbness and cuteness, the nonstop vigilance that comes with participating in US healthcare, the fraught space between digital gaming culture and online sexual commodification, damask patterns, the corporeal responses elicited by the digital visuality in video games, gold, the language that emerges from online censorship, examining the spectralization of digital ecosystems through unintended game mechanics, using fishes as main characters, metaphors, and as vehicles and activators to embed conversations of intertwined ecologies, and speaking to alternative systems of value and care. She is a relational fable-teller in dialogue with concurring socio-political and economic issues, constantly renegotiating her relationship to these concepts within the moralizing discourse in certain domains.

Bloomstone has exhibited with Hauser & Wirth (NY), Essex Flowers (NY), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), Rhizome (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (NY), Do Not Research (NY), CICA Museum (ROK), Hyacinth Gallery (NY), and Mass Gallery (TX), among others. Dahlia’s work is also affiliated with the White Columns Gallery (NY) artist registry. She is the recipient of the SPCUNY Actionist grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Master’s Thesis grant from Hunter College, the Ox-Bow CIP scholarship, and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. She has participated in residencies through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), School of Visual Arts, Ox-Bow, and Foreign Objekt and recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. From 2020 to 2022, she served as a Teaching Assistant at Hunter College, and in 2023, she was a Visiting Artist/Professor at UT Austin. Dahlia is currently an Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Art at Ramapo College, a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP), and a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow at Theater Mitu. She lives and works in New York.