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).

The art of pilgrimage

To develop a course on the art of pilgrimage, Prof. Holly Flora and Prof. Leslie Geddes traveled in June to Israel and Jordan to meet scholars of medieval art and to view sites long venerated in the Holy Land. As an invited speaker, Prof. Flora presented “Materiality and the Senses in Cimabue’s Assisi Murals (c. 1200)” to faculty and graduate students participating in a seminar on medieval art and the senses at Tel Aviv University. Their host, Dr. Renana Bartal, escorted Professors Flora and Geddes to sites near the Sea of Galilee, including Capernaum, the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, and Magdala. Medievalist doctoral students of Tel Aviv University took them to see the 12th-century Crusader church, now a Benedictine monastery, at Abu Ghosh. In Jerusalem they were fortunate to participate in a private tour of the Western Wall and the Via Dolorosa, facilitated by TAU’s Prof. Assaf Pinkus. Prof. Galit Noga-Banai of Hebrew University showed them the archaeological site of the first Marian church, located halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. One their own, Professors Flora and Geddes traveled to Masada, the fortified palace built by Herod the Great and site of an infamous siege during the First Jewish-Roman War, and Petra, where they saw the famous rock-cut architecture of the Nabataeans.

Gene Koss: Through the Valley

Through the Valley, an exhibition of recent sculpture by internationally-known glass sculptor Gene Koss will be on view at Arthur Roger Gallery, located at 432 Julia Street, from August 4–September 22, 2018. 

The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist in attendance, Saturday, August 4 from 6 to 9 pm in conjunction with the Hancock Whitney White Linen Night

TACTILE FOCUS: The Reciprocality of Painting & Architecture

The Lavin-Bernick Grant for faculty research has sponsored a collaboration between the Tulane School of Architecture and the Newcomb Art department, supporting an interdisciplinary course that examines the spatial behavior of color. Associate Professor Tiffany Lin (architect) and Assistant Professor Aaron Collier (painter) have co-authored a paper to describe this curriculum entitled, Tactile Focus: The Reciprocality of Painting and Architecture.  

This manuscript was presented at the 2018 National Conference for the Beginning Design Student (NCBDS) in Cincinnati and will be published in forthcoming conference proceedings. Lin and Collier have also been invited to show their work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February 2019. The Lavin-Bernick grant will support the creation and transportation of paintings to this exhibition, as well as fund travel and accommodation costs related to the opening.