Monday, July 21, 2025 at 12:00 AM to Monday, September 1, 2025 at 11:59 PM
18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica
**1629 18th Street -** **Artist Hearth** *beauty/violence: aria *by Carol Zou is the first in a series of installations culled from a body of research investigating the use of classical music for purposes of spatial banishment. The installation features video documentation of public sites that attempt to control the flow of pedestrian traffic through playing classical music; embroidered maps on sound cancelling panels that map out the relationship between sonic and architectural enclosure; surveillance speakers modified for public access; and a score connecting theories of violence, media, capital, the subaltern, and the role of aesthetics as refracted through the prism of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. *beauty/violence: aria *is part of our Revisiting The Citizen Artist series. To learn more about this series and The Citizen Artist click here. The *beauty/violence: aria *exhibit also includes an earlier work by Zou on displacement: *how to disappear a landscape*, 2017. In 2016, a new luxury apartment complex titled Galleries at Park Lane opened at the borders of Vickery Meadow, a community home to resettled refugees, immigrants, and Section 8 voucher holders. The apartment complex represented yet another harbinger of gentrification threatening Vickery Meadow’s denizens with displacement. In an attempt to contest the presaged erasure of the neighborhood, Zou began a clandestine campaign of counter-erasure, or taking the complex’s marketing signs. The stolen signs on display indicate how the language of art galleries and modernism are entangled with race, class, and housing politics. **About the artist** Carol Zou (b. 1988, Hepu, China) is a U.S. based community-engaged artist whose work engages themes of spatial justice, public pedagogy, and intercultural connection in multiracial neighborhoods. They engage durational, process-based collaborations with community contributors using mediums of craft, media arts, and public installation. Zou was active with Yarn Bombing Los Angeles and Otis Graduate Public Practice, organizations that were previously located at 18th Street Arts Center. Current and past affiliations include: Yarn Bombing Los Angeles, Michelada Think Tank, Trans.lation Vickery Meadow, Project Row Houses with the University of Houston, Asian Arts Initiative, American Monument, Imagining America, US Department of Arts and Culture, Spa Embassy, Enterprise Community Partners with Little Tokyo Service Center, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and The Hive. They believe that we are most free when we help others get free.