For a visual artist who is perhaps better known for his video work, aAron Munson is hitting pause on his new exhibit. Being… is a close-up examination of the world around us, the camera savant’s way of abstracting the concrete, or at least working some wonder back into the mundane that we all take for granted.
“A lot of these images are quite abstract so it forces you to take a moment because your brain can't filter it in a really immediate way to say that's just a tree or whatever like a familiar form they were used to just passing by,” the artist explained.
“It forces you to analyze the images and think, ‘What do I see in this? What am I actually seeing in the world? How much of that is just the filtered reality that my brain is like just tuning out and not actually observing in a real way. We often just pass by things every day that if we actually stopped to look at them closer, [they] are quite incredible. The world is an amazing place and yet people can filter out a lot of it without really seeing the beauty in it anymore as we did maybe when we were kids.”
The way Munson describes it, it sounds a lot like the artist fed his inner scientist to devise these images. He used carbon ink and a variety of chemicals to experiment with different visual effects that, combined with the macro lenses to get those extreme close-ups, brought a lot of technical and technological effort into the exhibit. He honed his focus onto energetic thumbnail-sized activities to be blown up in one large freeze frame of splendour.
The results: alien spacescapes that could just as easily be creamy swirls in a black pond of coffee, or strange mitochondria in mid-dance that look just as ambiguous as a satellite-view shot of some desert region of this planet, or another.
“Looking at them, you don't really get a sense of like scale and form necessarily. The exhibition is commenting on how we see form in the noise that is reality, that everything is made up of these atoms and molecules in different combinations. We see recognizable forms in that. To remember that all form is that noise; it is all the same thing. We are all connected to each other and to the world through this system.”
It’s a beautiful comment amid what at first glance is a series of stark, ghastly, chaotic, foreign images. Munson says "stop" so we stop. This chaos is our home so stop worrying about it. Stop rushing steeped in sweat from place to place, forgetting to breathe. It’s time to check back in and rediscover the beauty surrounding us.
“It’s serving as a reminder that we are woven into this crazy, chaotic, stew pot that is the universe,” he continued, talking about the importance of the refreshing perspective. “It's humbling and it takes some of the anxiety out of everyday life. You are connected to this incredible thing, this incredible system of things that's happening all around you: to not lose perspective on that, and to not take yourself and life too seriously, and to just to take time to see the beauty and the art in the everyday.”
Big times for the small shooter
Last month, Munson was announced as the winner of the eighth annual Eldon and Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize, an accolade that comes with a $10,000 bonus. He was nominated by dc3 Art Projects gallery for his recent exhibit Isachsen that examined the artist’s own father who spent a period fighting the elements and his own sanity while isolated at a weather station in Canada’s far north.
“It's an honour to be recognized among your peers like that and against the other nominated works as well. These are people that have long careers in visual arts and make incredible work. For me, I feel like I'm coming from film. Visual artist is relatively new to me. I’m doing more gallery-based work so it was nice to have that level of recognition early on in my career. That was an honour. It's nice to see all the other work that's happening and the calibre and quality of work that's happening in Edmonton and to celebrate that work as well.
Munson was also part of the Canadian Screen Award-winning team behind the documentary Equus: Story of the Horse that aired on CBC's The Nature of Things last fall and PBS, among other venues. He was also involved in the multidisciplinary group show Dyscorpia, which is enjoying an extended run in the Enterprise Square gallery until June 30.
