Faculty Spotlight - Aaron Collier

Fragments of Reality

Faculty Spotlight - Aaron Collier
Written by Emily Wilkerson

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Assistant Professor of Art Aaron Collier is inspired by questions and possibilities. His new paintings and works on paper, which will be on view in his upcoming exhibition, Of Rocks and Ruins at New Orleans’ Octavia Gallery, respond to the illusiveness of our inability to see or understand something fully.

“I find there to be an extreme amount of verisimilitude in abstract painting. Abstraction can feel more like an experience with the world than viewing something chronicled in its totality,” Collier explains. While his paintings are mostly composed of varying expanses of color and little recognizable imagery, Collier doesn’t claim to be a purely abstract artist; in other words, he doesn’t wish for there to be a complete divorce between his imagery and the world.

Of Rocks and Ruins will be comprised of Collier’s newest body of work that is inspired by traditional paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” 1483-1486, as well as his experience visiting Palatine Hill in Rome. In a recent conversation, he explained that while some architectural elements are more intact at Palatine Hill’s ancient site, visitors essentially examine shards and fragments in order to create a vision of what once was.

“The questions that drive my practice are several: how can we enjoy, how can we take pleasure in, how can we exist within finite knowledge? How can we savor and appreciate these beautiful, astounding fragments?”

Collier began teaching in Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts in 2006 as a professor of practice in painting and drawing, focusing on fundamentals in foundations courses such as line, shape, and color. During those first few years, he began reconsidering these same fundamentals in his own work.

“The daily opportunity to observe and participate in the creative processes of Tulane's driven students is incredibly inspiring, challenging, and humbling. Students have no idea how thankful I am for such a gift.”

Anne C. Nelson: Invasive Species at Staple Goods

Anne C. Nelson, Professor of Practice in Painting and Drawing, is the recipient of a 2018-19 Lavin Bernick Research Support Grant. 

During the summer of 2018 she traveled extensively, visiting locations in Minnesota, the East Coast, and Northern Europe where she has ancestral roots. 

Nelson's resulting art work reflects a desire to examine the negative consequences of European immigration in the 19th century and to consider the bearing that history has on present narratives. 

An exhibition of new paintings is on view at Staple Goods Gallery in New Orleans from September 8 - October 7, 2018.

Kevin H. Jones: Stellar Rays

Kevin H. Jones had a solo show, Stellar Rays, at Art Lab Akiba in Tokyo, Japan during the month of August 2018. The exhibition presented new work examining the fleeting and unattainable by investigating astronomy, high speed photography, and chemistry. By moving from the micro with chemistry to the macro with astronomy, ephemeral moments are captured in various forms. The work Self-Reflexive (shown left) is a high-speed camera that has been altered to give the illusion that it is melting. By representing the apparatus’ state of being as what can only be seen in slow motion, the sculpture captures what is elusive and unattainable.  Two works in the exhibition use star maps to elicit this mysterious nature. Within the work, Gravitational Field, a star chart is recreated on a tire innertube evoking a blackhole and astrophysics. While the sculpture, Hyperhat, presents the viewer with a silver-plated top hat that has been severed by an intersection of the vast universe as an LCD screen that shows a star map in motion. Both of these works bring the night sky to a more human level, manifested in a more tangible format. Other works examine graphics related to chemistry and popular culture by bringing clusters of images together that elude meaning.

New faculty: Sean Fader

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Sean Fader to the faculty as Professor of Practice in Photography.

Fader’s practice looks at the photographic event as the site of performance.  He is interested in how these images are created, disseminated, and digested in digital public spaces. 

Fader earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York University Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), Hunter College, Hampshire College, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET).