Aaron S. Coleman
After more than a decade away, returning to the Midwest has injected my research with a renewed specificity. I source materials and inspiration from various historical locations in Indianapolis and my backyard. The repossessed house next to my studio, an abandoned playground on my property, and local businesses that have “gone under” in historically Black neighborhoods have become sites for my studio production which functions as a praxis of revision and reclamation. I operate in the fissure between the often-myopic systems of (mis)information and the conversely, multifarious complexity of lived experience. I place historical research in direct comparison to current events, anecdotes, and an exploration into the milieu of the universe in which these stories take place. My multidisciplinary practice analyzes and reimagines these stories through printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation. Incorporating inherently charged, found objects and non-traditional materials which bear proof of untold, ignored or denied sociopolitical narratives, I create works that address how mundane and seemingly anodyne artifacts embody the complex and pervasive history of race/racism and class/classism in the United States.
