Aaron Cann is an artist whose current practice focuses on science, nature, and art – studying patterns, the interactions of phenomena, and, like all good photographers, light. Throughout much of Aaron’s work, there is an underlying critique of consumption and a broad interaction with philosophy. Late research has focussed on botany, computation, and the history of drawing and photography.
Plants have inspired many of Aaron’s recent works. Plants are very limited in their inputs and their functionality but, like a computer processing 1s and 0s, fantastic complexity emerges from the simplest inputs and functions. The computer, the plant, and the camera are similar – essentially simple machines exploiting physical phenomena that make manifest highly detailed and spectacular systems.
In terms of production, Aaron’s practice is currently exploring new light-based printing processes and re-photographing. The artist is very involved in the fabrication of gallery installations he has done, enjoying the restrictions and possibilities in material logics.
Aaron’s work is almost always photographic in some sense, having studied Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Arts. Photographic works are wide-ranging, however, encompassing film/moving image and photographed sculpture. It is important to Aaron that subject informs medium and medium informs subject.
For example, these sculptural works that have been pressed and reduced to a surface, have been explored through the scanner and digital collage – a camera and a medium specifically designed to capture and deal with the surface exclusively. Resulting in photographic works that explore illusions in the surface.
Aaron’s work has spanned a huge spectrum of scale; some works significantly larger than a person, some works so miniscule that one requires tweezers to handle them. These exist in varied forms but are often neatly contained, framed in some way.
The ultimate focus of all of Aarons’ work is on the collective realisation of profound concepts (which can also manifest in profound realisation of humble concepts), what he ‘ascribes to art its most power in doing’.
Aaron Cann CV