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Artist Information
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September, 2010

Artist Statement

My core practice is large scale site-specific wall painting with related works on paper and canvas. The work is a synthesis of three distinct practices: comics, collage, and muralism (both traditional and spraycan). The superhero comics of the sixties and seventies were my first aesthetic training ground. As a fan, collector and wannabe pro-cartoonist I became conversant with the extraordinarily dynamic and seductive vocabulary of ink line rendering techniques developed by a group of brilliant, mostly working class, mid-century cartoonists including Wallace Wood, Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, and the towering figure of Jack Kirby, whose exaggeration and abstraction of the human form paved the way for the deeply fetishistic superhero comics drawn by a later generation in the ‘90s. It was in these decadent late comics, first published by Image and drawn by Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Jae Lee, Todd MacFarlane and others, that I recognized an erotic flowering of the sublimated passions of superhero fandom. The old moral universe had disappeared, along with the old human body, along with the old well-crafted narrative. Only the obsessively detailed depiction of power, terror, and physical extremity remained. The comics, no longer a mass culture disposable, but now increasingly sold only in specialty shops affectively identical to adult bookstores, had become a Bataillean pleasure kingdom.

Artist Biography

Aaron was born in 1961 and recently moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He is the cofounder of the Clarion Alley Mural Project in San Francisco, where he was director from 1996 until 2001. He has created murals on a police guard post in Taiwan, on a private residence in Los Angeles, and, in collaboration with Andrew Schoultz, on an exterior wall on Sixteenth Street near Third Street in San Francisco. Other mural and wall-painting projects include the Theatre Rhinoceros Lobby; Superhero Warehouse on the exterior of 47 Clarion Alley, in collaboration with Rigo 00; the Labor Temple lobby, San Francisco, and has created site specific murals for the Hammer Museum.

Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION
1981-82 San Francisco Art Institute

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009 At Work in the Egg Fields 39 Hotel, Honolulu
2007 Rainbow 6: Warsong Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York
2006 Drawings Timezone 8 Editions, Factory 798, Beijing, China
2005 My Funny Valentine Lobby installation Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Massachusets
2004 Drawings PeerUK, London, England
2002 Phallopia Lobby installation, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009 The Hills are Alive curated by Laurie Steelink. Circus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2009 Infinity curated by Andrew Schoultz. Scion Space, Los Angeles, CA
2009 Superfine Morgan Lehman Gallery, NYC
2009 Beautiful/Decay A-Z Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2008 At the Brewery, 1993-2007: the Finale Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA
2006 The New Collage Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY
2005 New Slang Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2004 Now/Here The Brewery, Los Angeles, CA
2004 Semi-Lucid White Columns, New York, NY
2004 Freewall curated by Jody Zellen, Kellog Gallery, CalPoly Pomona, CA

AWARDS AND RESIDENCIES
2009 Headlands Center for the Arts Sam & Adele Golden Residency
2005 Smith College Print Workshop artist in residence
1992 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship

COLLECTIONS
Progressive Insurance
New York Public Library
Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Davis Museum, Wellesley College
Hood Museum, Dartmouth College
Smith College Museum of Art
UCLA Hammer Museum Contemporary Collection