BIO
Dahlia (Colón; matronymic maiden name) Bloomstone (b. 1995) is a Puerto Rican/American artist and Hunter College MFA (NY, 2022) graduate with a BFA from Bard College (NY, 2018). Bloomstone has presented with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI, NY), New Museum/Rhizome (NY), CultureHub (NY), Hauser & Wirth (NY), Blade Study (NY), Galerie Timonier (NY), Beverly’s (NY), Theater Mitu (NY), The Tomorrow Archive (NY), LMCC (NY), InterAccess (CAD), Westbeth Gallery (NY) for the Independent Study Program (ISP) exhibition, Essex Flowers (NY), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (NY), CICA Museum (ROK), and Hyacinth Gallery (NY), among others. She has been invited to present at institutions including Bard College (NY), Queens College (NY), the University of Texas at Austin (TX), Rochester Institute of Technology (NY), Recess Art (NY), and the New York Arts Program (NY). 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 New York Community Trust Van Lier grant. She has participated in programs including the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Theater Mitu, School of Visual Arts, Ox-Bow, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. She was also a co-founder of New Uncanny Gallery in West Harlem, NY. From 2020 to 2022, she served as a Teaching Assistant at Hunter College. In 2023, she was a Visiting Artist/Professor at UT Austin. She currently teaches 3D animation at Ramapo College in New Jersey and serves as the teaching Artist-in-Residence at the State University of New York at Oswego, where she is teaching an experimental games course and working towards her first institutional solo exhibition. Dahlia was an Elaine G. Weitzen 2024-2025 studio participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP). She lives and works in New York.
STATEMENT
Dahlia has developed a body of work rooted in video and internet research, which has evolved to encompass animation, social practice, video games, film, and performance. However, her focus for the past three years has been on video games. In her practice, she thinks through social value, respectability, and moral regulation. She considers the politics around certain technologies, which function as stand-ins for deeper cultural and digital inheritances. Dahlia is currently most interested in "labor aesthetics" - in conjugating the surrealities of affective work. Central themes that push her work forward during this time are material change, financial mischief, performing labor through speculative video, and sabotage (which is a way of reading the world and one's position in it); the fraught space between digital gaming culture and online sexual commodification (and abuse); damask patterns; surveying the technologies and economies around the social implications of sexual commerce and investigating the paradigm shifts in these economies; dumbness and cuteness as inquiries; the corporeal responses elicited by the digital visuality in video games; gold; the language that emerges from online censorship; 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 concurrent socio-cultural issues and is constantly renegotiating her relationship to these concepts within moralizing online discourse.
