ABOUT AARON
Aaron Turner is a photographer and educator currently based in Arkansas. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience in two main areas of the U.S., the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. Aaron uses a 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, and abstraction. Aaron received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Turner’s awards include the 2018 Light Work Residency, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Residency, 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant, 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship, 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund Award & a 2022
Darryl Chappell Foundation Residency (Ogden Museum of Southern Art).
ARTIST STATEMENT
Most recently, in my practice, I am primarily concerned with constructing images that address abstraction, history, blackness as material, surveillance, artificial intelligence, the archive, and the metaphysics of race. Through my series Black Alchemy, I respond to internal questions about identity, representation, ontology, discursive enterprise, and the artists’ role in the studio space.
Black Alchemy provides a lens through which I see the world while simultane-ously considering the past, present, and future. I use light in combination with geometric abstraction painting to shift questions of identity within an established, often monolithic historical narrative and address the discourse of photography.
