Aaron is from St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a Studio and Art History major and will be applying for graduate programs in architecture.
Aaron’s image is the piece is Purple Iris, 2018, by Cai Guo-Qiang, a contemporary Chinese artist who works with pigment and gunpowder. This work was created for the show “Flora Commedia: Cai Guo-Qiang” at the Uffizi.
“I first learned about him in Karil Kucera’s Arts of China class in my fall semester of 2017, and have since been keeping up to date with what he’s been working on. His work blends performance and abstraction in a way I have never seen before. He hosts events where he makes his pieces, covering a canvas with gunpowder and setting it off, not knowing how it will appear at the end. Studying art was always interesting for me, but Cai’s work actually excited me; there are so many unknowns in his process, and the results are truly stunning.”