Description
Aaron R. Turner’s Moves From The Archive is a richly layered book that pulls from a wide array of ideas, influences and traditions. The photographs, which are a part of the larger and ongoing project Black Alchemy, re-present cultural and familial images, exploring them as both subject matter and material. Using the studio as a space for construction, Turner employs cut paper, projected and natural light, black cloth, mirrors, paint, oil sticks, cellophane and packaging materials for analog photography as building blocks for his images. The result is a formal language that exists in dialogue with legacies of nonrepresentational art in both photography and painting. Turner also challenges assumptions about what it means to be a Black artist working within this tradition – drawing a parallel between racial passing and abstraction.
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Aaron Turner is a teacher, curator, writer, founder of the Center for Photographers of Color (CPoC) at the University of Arkansas, and host of the CPoC podcast. Active in the photo and contemporary art community, he often uses these platforms to discuss his primary muses: other Black artists and activists. He uses photography to pursue personal stories of people of color in two main areas of the U.S., the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. Aaron also uses the view camera to create still life studies on the topics of race, history, blackness as material, and the role of the black artist. He received an MA in Visual Communication from Ohio University and an MFA in Visual Arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers. His work has been on view at The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Czurles-Nelson Gallery at SUNY Buffalo State, James Kerney Campus Gallery at Mercer County Community College, the MEDICI Gallery University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Light Work.
