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 Turner’s 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 ... view more »
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 Turner’s 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.
This book highlights Turner’s varied approach to image making, fusing elements of still life, appropriation and painting to comment on the complex nature of Black American history and representation. Blackness takes on a multitude of meanings in this work. It simultaneously operates as identity, materiality, metaphor, history, and color. It is also an allusion to the darkroom, where many of Turner’s photographs are made.
Free parking is available in the surface lot or parking garage at Newfields, as well as a self-serve coat check. Enter Newfields via the main entrance and follow the directional signage to reach DeBoest Lecture Hall.
Aaron R. 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. Turner also uses the 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. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation, and 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
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