About

TNMOT AZTRO

Tnmot Aztro is a collaborative multidisciplinary company featuring six to ten artists at any given time. Sculpture, spatial design, lighting design, installation, photography, sound design, and at times seven or more movement artists including Wilkerson. The dance collaborators draw from distinct movement styles and traditions: Modern, Hip-Hop, Ballet, Jazz, West African, Post Modern, GAGA. Tnmot Aztro mainly creates performance installations in museums, galleries and site-specific locations.

Tnmot Aztro believe’s in creating immersive experiences wherever the viewer enters. A completely altered world with altered rules. Tnmot Aztro considers that the complexities within art derive from the alienation of objects, identities, the body, sounds and humans, among many things. As an entity the artistic practice in making performance, sculpture, experimental film, photography and dance is rooted in repurposing or redefining meanings of “fine art” and its attachments to colonialism, white supremacy, and institutionalized racism.

Tnmot Aztro conspires against “fine art” asking what it is? Who has access to it? How does art become fine? Where is the “margin” marginalized, displaced, disproportioned ? And what systems were put in place to keep black and brown specifically black and brown queer folk out.

“My practice articulates epistemology, and ontology by the producing of large scale performance installations where audiences, public mass or viewers are submerged within an immersive experience that populates multiple meanings, multiple engines and embody specific movement vocabularies, choreographic structures, and improvisations. While integrating sculpture, noise, and video components audience's remain faithful to traces of research stored in their bodies.”

Thematic concepts include gender, labor, race, cultural competency, possession, viewer responsibility, sensory overload, critical thought, the body, black abstraction, identity, media-created leadership, rhetoric, technology, control, sex, dogma, climate change, territory, zoning, and queerness.

Arien Wilkerson/Tnmot Aztro, sold out performances, online lectures and events have taken place at art galleries, institutions and incubator spaces such as University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA, Yale School of Art, New Haven CT, University of Connecticut, Judson Memorial Church NYC, Rhode Island School of Design, Trinity College, Real Art Ways, HighTide Gallery, Philadelphia PA, Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia PA, Icebox Project Space Philadelphia, Pa, AS22O Providence RI, SPACE Gallery Portland Maine, Wesleyan University Middletown CT, The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts Fairfield CT, and Slought Foundation, Philadelphia PA. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY, The Historic Town and County Club of Hartford CT, The Wadsworth Atheneum, The Garden Center for Contemporary Dance, Amistad Center for Art & Culture, Hartford Public Library, University of Hartford.

Biography

Logo Designed in Collaboration With

Darcy ST. Onge 

Arien Wilkerson ( They/she) is a queer, black, choreographer, dancer, film maker, director, producer, installation artist. The Hartford, CT native began his dance training under the tutelage of Jolet Creary, and has been a student at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, The Artists Collective, Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts, and the Batsheva Dance Company "Gaga Intensive" in New York, NY along with visiting the company in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 2008, they were a scholarship recipient for travel to Cape Verde, Africa to participate in CulturArte, a youth arts residency program. There, they studied with life and performance mentor Deborah Goffe (Artistic Director of Scapegoat Garden) and Mano Preto (Artistic Director of Raiz di Polon). As a high school senior in 2009, Wilkerson traveled throughout parts of Eastern Europe on scholarship additionally David Dorfman and Nicole Stanton selected Arien's work for inclusion in Wesleyan University’s Dance Masters programming, recognizing his potential as a groundbreaking choreographer in New England.

In their early role as founder and Artistic Director of TNMOT AZTRO, Arien has been commissioned by Hartford’s Town & County Club to develop their sold-out show BLACK BOY JUNGLE which went on to the Wadsworth Atheneum. As an Artist in Residence at The Garden Center for Contemporary Dance (2013-2014), Arien developed three iterations of "The Projector Series", which went on to sell out RAW(Real Art Ways) for 3 consecutive evenings. Arien served as co-facilitator for the Invisible City Project Cooperative, a space and program with the goal of supporting Greater Hartford dance artists in making their best work. Wilkerson teaches numerous amounts of workshops and gives lectures to youth, adults, non dancers and seniors throughout the globe.

Wilkerson recently awarded funding from The Penn Treaty Special Services District Philadelphia PA 2021, Illuminate the arts fund Philadelphia Pa 2021, The Graham Foundation for advanced studies in fine arts (20-21), The Velocity Fund (21), In 2020 the Sachs Program for arts & Innovation at Upenn, 2019 The Greater New Haven Arts Council & Connecticut office of the arts - Artist Workforce Initiative Sponsorship (2019), The Connecticut office of the arts Artist Fellow (2019). The Connecticut office of the arts project grant (2018), two New England Dance Fund Grants (2017) (2018), The spirit of Juneteenth award from the Amistad Center for Art and Culture(2017), The National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read'' Grant (2018), The Director’s Discretionary Fund Award from the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund (2018) and was selected as NEFA’S 2018 Rebecca Blunk Fund Awardee.

I see my gender Identity as Non Binary - They/Them or she/her. I Identify as a femme non binary for I am a sis not a cis. I do not want encourage anyone to think my “Masc-Ness” is banished because I choose to Identify as femme. It is a form of cultural production that is individual and collective. *Original sentence: Arca - Extrapolated by Ari aztro*