Paint has the binary ability to summon and refuse, reveal and conceal, beautify and debase. Aaron Collier’s work attempts to revel in these manifold offerings, for in so doing, the resulting imagery is consonant with our tangled interaction with the world. Routine are encounters marked by disclosure and obstruction; we happen upon phenomena that we are seemingly able to know, grasp, and understand along with those we fundamentally cannot. Paint fittingly pictures this paradox, for painting itself is an in-between act, a simultaneous doing and undoing. Collier’s paintings, drawing and collage, thus traffic more in fragment than in chronicle. Images that indefinitely “suggest” allow him to situate the viewer and himself as deferential participants, adventuring with the image.

Aaron Collier lives in New Orleans where is an Assistant Professor at Tulane University. Solo exhibitions include Cole Pratt Gallery and Staple Goods, an artist cooperative in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and has been featured in New American Paintings. Collier’s paintings are represented in collections such as the Boston Medical Center, Iberia Bank and New Orleans Museum of Art. He has participated in residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Ragdale Foundation and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.