Black Alchemy: Resolve (Attempt #2)
Aaron R. Turner
June 7-August 15, 2024
Opening Reception: June 7, 6-9pm, artist present
Free and open to the public
Aurora PhotoCenter Main Gallery
1125 Brookside Avenue, Suite C9, Indianapolis
Aaron Turner’s ongoing project Black Alchemy re-presents 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 visual language that exists in dialogue with legacies of nonrepresentational art in both photography and painting.
Turner writes of the series, “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 simultaneously considering the past, present, and future. I use light in combination with influences of geometric abstract painting to shift questions of identity within an established, often monolithic historical narrative and address the discourse of photography.”
The exhibition Black Alchemy: Resolve Attempt #2 incorporates work made in 19th-Century processes, such as daguerrotype and van dyke printing, as well as more modern methods including silver gelatin and inkjet prints, a range of techniques from the invention of photography to the present. Also included in the exhibition is Rung of Knowledge #3 (mimesis), a selection of 10 books for essential reading, including The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, Passing, by Bella Larsen, and the artists’s own There May Still Be Time Left from 2020. Philosopher and art critic Darla Megan, Ph.D., will provide a contextual essay to accompany the exhibition.
First exhibited at Penumbra Foundation in New York City as Attempt #1 in 2023, Black Alchemy: Resolve (Attempt #2) is the latest phase of a series and ever-evolving exhibition started in 2016. A selection of images from Black Alchemy was included in the book Moves from The Archive, published by Sleeper Studio in 2023.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Aaron Turner will give a demo of the van dyke process on June 8, 1-4pm at Aurora PhotoCenter.
Aaron Turner is an artist, educator, and independent curator based in Northwest 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 also uses the 4 x 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, a 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,2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and a 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.
Annual operating support for Aurora PhotoCenter provided by the City of Indianapolis through the Indy Arts Council. Additional support provided by the Efroymson Family Fund.