Dahlia Bloomstone is a 27-year-old Puerto Rican/American artist and recent Hunter MFA graduate with a BFA from Bard College. Dahlia has developed a body of work rooted in video, which has evolved to encompass animation, sculpture, video games, film, and performance. Dahlia attempts to address and reconcile representations of exchange, domesticity, fragility, joy, social value, and mutual aid, often through the lens of sex work (SW), absent or under-theorized in the art canon.
She creates, with vulnerability and political urgency, speculative content that leads to questions investigating prevailing stereotypes of morality that permeate in specific polarized occupations, devaluation, the generative potential of ambivalence, SW in apocalypse, the commodification of our multiple body-selves, and acceptance through humanizing of the self.
In her artistic praxis, she uses (long lists in her writing) perverse storytelling, private vernacular, masking, layering, repetition, and artifice as conceptual devices. The artist employs accessible fishtank metaphors and cute characters to deliver stories to speak through the absurdity of concurring socio-political and economic issues and is constantly renegotiating her relationship to these concepts within the panoptic discourse on the Internet. Her work concludes that SW is an enduring, pervasive, timeless construct that has and will always exist even after reimagining multiple adjacent worlds.
Her most recent new media work includes Push for Help, a diaristic episodic video series set in a money-driven fishtank simulator gentlemen's club, and Money-Driven FishTank Game, a Roblox game. She also wrote and acted in, with her collaborator Maya Baran, a short film entitled Opulence which deals with sexworksurrealism, making it its own character in the film. (please email for password to see it😁😉😌)
Some influences: Cecelia Condit, Lena Chen, Peggy Ahwesh, Tony Oursler, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jayson Scott Musson, Mike Smith, George Kuchar, Sayaka Murata, Wong Ping, Sondra Perry, JODI, Olia Lialina, Jon Rafman, Ed Atkins, Felix Gonzales-Torres
