Aaron Pennington: Your Distance
May 31 – July 12, 2025
Central Server Works – Venice, CA

Central Server Works is pleased to present Your Distance, the debut solo exhibition by Aaron Pennington, featuring new work across etched mirrors, blind embossments, color-inflected surfaces, and serialized editions. At the center of the exhibition is the first full presentation of Knowing, a modular and conceptually driven series of etched mirrored panels that refract cultural memory through citation, repetition, and spatial disorientation. Developed in parallel with Pennington’s investigations into pressure-based print processes and formal systems of containment, the exhibition introduces a dense and tactile visual language. Your Distance offers a meditation on how language, memory, and material behave when pushed against the limits of recognition. Equal parts archive, surface study, and perceptual experiment, the show marks a significant evolution in Pennington’s singular and process-intensive practice.

Pennington’s work emerges equally from the physical literacy of skateboarding and a deep, technical grounding in printmaking. Having studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and ArtCenter College of Design, he has since built a multifaceted practice as both artist and printmaker, operating print studios and working closely with some of the most notable artists exploring printmaking within interdisciplinary practices. His collaborative projects span installation, sculpture, and publishing—expanding the role of print as a critical and flexible medium across contexts. While these experiments have pushed the boundaries of the form, Your Distance brings Pennington’s solo work into sharp focus: rigorous, referential, and materially exacting.

At the center of Your Distance is Knowing (Central Server Works), the debut iteration of an ongoing mirror-based series in which each installation is retitled for its site. The naming is structural, not decorative: each iteration reflects a belief that knowledge is never neutral, but shaped by where and how it’s encountered. Etched into each 12 x 12 inch mirror are fragments of cultural language — Now and Later, 2Pacalypse Now, Be Here Now, Most Known Unknown, Why Pictures Now — forming a ghost grid of associative references that drift across time and media. The recurrence of “now” becomes both a punchline and an incantation: a rhythm built on misrecognition, layered memory, and mediated repetition.

Though the works often begin in a grid, they unravel across the gallery’s Venice location, inhabiting corners, and interruptions in the architecture. The mirrors draw from the sequencing logic of Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma and the reflective instability of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror paintings. But Pennington’s emphasis is not on reflection of the self—it is on what surrounds us, what slips through us. His surfaces are not images, but sites of interference. Like a skater navigating urban terrain, Pennington re-reads the architecture of memory as a space of improvisation and precision. 

Also on view is Surface Tension, a series of blind embossments developed from meticulous hand drawings of warped and layered chain-link fences. First presented at the 2025 LA Printed Matter Art Book Fair, the work returns here with new scale and density. Produced through zinc plate etching and pressure on dampened Hahnemühle Copperplate Paper, the prints materialize friction—pressure recorded as surface. The fence, like the mirror, is a structure meant to contain, but here it shifts, bleeds, and breaks.

With Your Distance, Pennington introduces a system of thinking through fragmentation, rhythm, and process. The influence of skateboarding is present not just in references or attitude, but in method: the discipline of approach, the acceptance of repeated failure, the obsession with surface.

Text by Joshua Oduga