SALON: DARYA DIAMOND "Roly-Poly"

DARIA DIAMOND
Roly-Poly 
Solo exhibition of the artist's work

 

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ROLY-POLY

IMPORT EXPORT is excited to present Roly-Poly - the new solo exhibition of work by Mexican-American artist Darya Diamond (b. 1991). Opening at Salon in London on 28 May, Roly Poly is the first presentation of the artist's work as part of the gallery programme.

Raised in LA, based in London today, Diamond is an artist working in sculpture, photography, print and time-based media. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths University of London and BA from Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

In her work, Diamond explores literal and symbolic figurations of the body as a primordial workplace. Her practice is ritually and theoretically rooted in methods of reproduction – regenerating and renegotiating the promise of transactional intimacy, care, and invisible labour. The nexus of Diamond’s research is deeply grounded relational ecosystems and the contradictory subjectivities involved in sustaining and maintaining bodies and minds. Casts and personal surveillance footage provide rich material landscapes from which to re-appropriate, re-contextualise and exhibit an ethics of care. How is the body a site of mutual aide, power, pleasure, and labour?
Curated by Kola Śliwińska, Roly-Poly  at Salon by IMPORT EXPORT is a portal to the universe of rich images and symbols conjured by Diamond as part of her performative practice. The exhibition comprises new printed textile works as well as wall and sculptural installation in latex and porcelain.

 

We invite you to read the exhibition text below.

 

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Kola Śliwińska: "Roly-Poly"

The intimate entanglements unraveling, crawling out from kitchen pantries; the counters cluttered with freshly pressed linens and bursting with ornamented kitchen tiles—an ordinary domestic space, or, at least, the very idea of it.

 

Darya Diamond’s printed textiles, juxtaposed with imagery of glistening kitchen tiles unfold across the artist’s solo exhibition at Salon by Import Export, unveiling the hidden infrastructures of sexual and domestic that weave through the blurred thresholds of private and public spaces.

 

Sex-Domestic-Excitation loop confined within the system, [1] where female labour—not just physical but also social––transforms  into a dynamic, edible panopticon. Disguised as a sweet, round dessert or a mood-enhancing pill, discipline, method, and constant surveillance operate as insidious tools for regulating the domestic regiment, influenced by repressive apparatus. A Roly-Poly, soft and swirled, wraps remnants of the past in sweetness, each fold a trace of labour, multi-layered narratives, and longing.

 

The boundaries between power and autonomy are often blurred and negotiable; sexual versus domestic, “private” versus “public”— spheres of marginal status quo. As a cosmic duo, raw and uncertain, visible and invisible dynamics orbit one another in a suspended loop of unresolved worlds.

 

Diamond’s practice transforms control into agency. It shifts the focus from the body-as-object to the system that controls its movement, laying bare capitalism’s  hidden complexity–its agency and power dynamics. The narrative lies within these hidden infrastructures, waiting to unfold, proposing a different form of liberation.

 

Diamond's Boots Series comprise amalgams of resin and antidepressants, combined using a unique technique to cast porcelain-toned sculptures in the shape of size 34 boots, objects that traverse both her artistic and sex work practices, worn in the studio and during encounters with clients. Boots, like bodies, move between states of labour and diligent effort, between sex work, everyday tasks, and art–they are laden with the sweat of economic survival. They are cumbersome and hefty, yet still mimic the pleasures of the night before. The intersection between art and sex emerges in the creation of characters. Whether fictional or real, as in both sex and art, personas are being sold. Sex and art labour act as long-standing symbionts. Creation and intimacy blur into acts of therapy and economic survival. The synthetic fusion of drugs and plastics in line with Paul B. Preciado’s concept of pharmacopornographic power illustrates how substances regulate emotions, sex, labour, and gender performance within capitalist economies. Boots–both sculptural and actual–become testaments to the unseen, the functional, and the substantial.

 

The hand-crafted and engraved porcelain tiles feature imprints of Diamond’s body and stills from her performances, rendered in varying degrees of abstraction. Juxtaposed side by side on a wall, they evoke a live yet motionless act, echoing the illusion of a moving image. The layers of imagery and narrative are relocated to the epicentre of the domestic sphere: the kitchen—where sweetness mingles with the sweat of invisible labour. Similarly to the multilayered Roly-Poly dessert, Diamond’s Tiles relate multilayered narratives of the body as a primal workplace. They are further accentuated by the technical process behind screen printing–the application of ink, the pressing, the exposure, repeated over and over. The process behind the tiles continuously regenerates and renegotiates notions of transactional intimacy and care.

 

Travel Lodge, 14 Blackheath Road—a bedsheet, stained with pleasure—unfolds as a confection of overlaid symbols, printed across a soft textile: lush imagery tangled with red-rose wallpaper patterns and multiplied personifications of Santa Muerte, the patron of death, yet equally tied to healing and sexual labour. Hung unceremoniously on a wall, but swaying with the wind or the viewer’s touch, it stirs memories of both pleasure and the strain of labour–stained with sweat and haunted by lubricated desires. Hotel linen—perpetually marked—becomes a conceptual object, exposing the erasure and endurance demanded by sex work. Like the body itself, the sheet is both a stage and a record, a living witness to physical and mental potential.

 

Diamond's practice is rooted in relational ecosystems acknowledging the pervasive nature of female labour, intertwining sex work and domestic labour into a singular, unified visual language by presenting the remnants of labour not through detached consumption but as a visceral spectacle of everyday objects navigating complicity, power, and vulnerability. Like the sweet layers of jam and vanilla curd of the Roly-Poly, it peels away at the hidden and invisible essence of the unknown, where liberation emerges only through sex, through performativity. [2]

 

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