AARON COLEMAN
Aaron Coleman is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Arizona. He received his MFA from Northern Illinois University.
Statement:
My work has evolved into a blanket description of the apocalyptic world in which we live. Police brutality, racial discrimination, religious extremism, persecution of the LGBT communities, economic unrest, global warming, species extinction, habitat loss, holy wars, power trips and ego mania are the extremes my work addresses. Each piece is an explosive combination of comic book pages, religious iconography and advertising which illustrates a world in ruin and the heroes and villains who occupy it. I appropriate imagery from many different eras in history to present an idea of where we’ve come from and where we might be headed. Appropriation allows me to produce imagery not unique to my own imagination, but rather, universal across cultural histories. Typically layering several printmaking techniques in each of my prints, I visually recall the chaos found within social media, news, advances in technology, television, music and movies, the distractions that keep the masses pacified. I utilize color, pattern, texture and appropriated imagery to re-contextualize these distractions. Rips, tears and non-traditional surface treatments such as rust convey a sense of pointlessness to our material world and beg the viewer to consider the larger roll we play as humans. We consume resources and pollute our planet all in an effort to make things bigger and better while ignoring, or even destroying, our relationships with each other and our environment.
