 [This interview with gallery director Angie Reed Garner took place on Tuesday Oct. 27 2024.] Aaron Raymer Between Boredom and Oblivion Artist Interview Beer Goggles This is a series I did when I was out drinking. I am always observing and taking pictures of things. I noticed when I took the last drink off my beer and looked through the glass, it looked like a filtered lens. Even though I wasn't in the studio, I still felt like I should be making something. That’s why I began doing them consistently, like a series, instead of a few random shots here and there. I think now they feed into this body of work because even though I was out doing things I was still looking to do more. I was bored. Even having a fun exciting time, I was still trying to do more, trying to create.  It usually caused comments, people trying to figure out what I am taking a picture of, what I am doing. So it usually—if not caused a scene— got attention. Especially as I tried to find the right lights… I might go (with the glass) in the direction of someone and then they would be curious of what I was doing. I guess some people maybe thought I was taking a picture of them, and trying to hide it with the glass. It was very difficult to do, to get them [the camera and the glass] centered and lined up. Some of them still have a drop (of beer) in them. Each one usually took around eight shots and then I would have to go through to find the one that was centered the best. It took both hands, one for the glass and one for the camera. Obviously I had been drinking; hand-eye coordination was a little tougher in that situation. It had a performative aspect, the interactions with the other patrons of the bar. It was… documentation of my life, my experience. I started seeing through the bottom of the glass on my last drink emptying it that there was a beautiful image at the bottom, the whole glass. There’s not much editing done to the photos. Mainly I did a little bit of vignette to get rid of the outside [content]. When the neons and the bright bar lights came through, there was already high contrast there. I didn’t have to brighten or saturate the photos, it was already in those spaces. Almost the darker the place, the better.  Time Flies When You’re Getting Cancer These are all personally-used lighters that I’ve saved since I started smoking in 1994. I think initially I kept them because I was proud I didn’t let them end up in the pockets of lighter thieves. Most of the lighters have a burn mark on them from snuffing out my pipe while smoking weed and chewed up bottoms from popping the caps off of bottles. I’ve been smoking for 30 years. I made a sculpture for each of those years. I didn’t get so particular as to know which lighters are from which years. But I picked events that happened in each of those years that are personal to me in some way, and then represented those events with the lighters I later picked. It took a long time to figure out what I wanted to do with them… I knew I didn’t want to do a typical gradient or fade like I’ve seen many times. They weren’t just found objects, they were personal to me. That‘s why I put them on stone pedestals, and then I put them on another pedestal. Pedestals can give objects importance so I took advantage of that to help point out the uniqueness and personal aspects of the lighters.  2009 - Remington Remington, that's my son’s name. He’s the most important thing in my life, so that’s one of the first ones I did. The most important thing to me is trying to be a good father. Since I did not have one I learned a lot of what NOT to do and I’m still learning what to do. Still trying. 2011 - Tony (noose) Brown noose, for my friend Tony’s suicide. There’s a couple in there that deal with suicide. I was a pallbearer twice before I graduated high school, for friends who committed suicide. Tony’s was when I was older and he had kids. I was a pallbearer for him as well. Him leaving kids behind, that was a lot harder to deal with. It seems a lot of my friends including myself struggled with suicidal thoughts. After seeing how it affected the others left behind it became less of a simple clean way out. Especially after my son was born… I haven’t considered it since. 2006 - New York Groove, 2015 - Leaving New York are two pieces that bookend my time in NYC. People where I'm from tended to never really leave the area or neighborhood. They didn’t even venture downtown. Maybe out of fear or lack of options or just not being aware of possibilities. I knew that I needed to get out and experience more. I wasn't going to be happy with the kind of proscribed life I’d seen other people engaging in. When I was young I wanted to make money more than get educated, but as I started to see what’s going on in the workplace and being complacent in that type of life… that was not going to be fulfilling. I had success in the workforce, becoming plant manager at a screen printing company making more money at 22 than my mom made when I was growing up. I had maxed out in my field early but it wasn’t fulfilling so I went back to school. I discovered contemporary art and saved up enough to pay for my tuition, but I didn’t need it because of scholarships. After undergrad I applied to all the schools in NYC because I knew I was going to New York regardless. I got in everywhere but Columbia. I picked NYU because of the location, East Village, tons of art, music and history with counter culture. When I got to New York it felt like where I belonged. There were people, art, entertainment all the time, constant stimulus. It’s never quiet and you are never alone. Even if you are alone, there are people around. I identified with a lot more people there than where I was from. I spent almost 10 years there (NYC), ended up moving and leaving to support my ex-wife’s career. I was the primary caregiver for my kid, our future together, at that time, was tied to her career. She needed to go run a plant before she could progress on the corporate ladder. We were supposed to leave and come back (to NYC) but she wanted to stay in Richmond. There was no way I could do that, so I came back to Louisville. Close enough to my son, a good sized city with an arts scene. I could teach at U of L. Seemed like a good landing spot.  Pissing Your Life Away, Flush My Life Into Pieces, Meet Me in the Bathroom The three yellow pieces are a series… The first title comes from Tubthumping. They say “pissing the night away” but I always sang it as pissing your life away. Around that time (90’s) I was still figuring out what I was doing. That was when I was not quite into contemporary art, I was still enjoying flash art and tattoos and stuff… I felt like I was missing something, wasting away, that along with the suicidal thoughts, is probably why I kept changing the words. It has to do with feeling like I’m not doing enough, kinda wasting your time, even though I enjoyed the socializing and drinking and drugs, I still always have something in me that feels like I am not doing enough, checking things off a list. So it references that. While the time was not necessarily wasted, I networked and made friends, it was still pulling away from my studio time. Even though I was still working and getting things done, I could have accomplished a lot more if I didn’t spend as much time drinking and drugging. The glass fire hydrant form… I have three and I have been carrying those around for 20 years. The whole time I knew I was leaning toward a fire hydrant reference and I wanted to work with things on two different planes, elevated and also touching the floor. When I started thinking about the fire hydrant I began to relate it to my body, it was me as the fire hydrant pissing my life away. I use the height of my physical body a lot in my work. The crotch height on that piece is where my crotch is. I put myself in my work with the proportions. The tile work is a reference to a Rubik's Cube—I expanded the grout lines, to go back to party culture and 80s reference. I really love the aesthetic and the way the colors and the curves and the fluidity of the yellow forms vs the rigidity brutalism of the tile. So I expanded that to Flush My Life Into Pieces, looking for a way to work that into a wall structure, again on two planes. That’s also a 90s song “Cut My Life Into Pieces ” [Last Resort]. I continued with the forms and took it to the other piece (Meet Me In The Bathroom) which is a cocaine reference. There are two drips or drains going down, both sinuses. I’ve always had sinus trouble so I never got really into coke much, because it clogged me up. This one I see the yellow more as snot, mucous. In My Own Way & Ok, Boomerang New Balance pieces. I’ve had foot issues my whole life, and when I moved to NY I got plantars fasciitis from walking everywhere. I went to the podiatrist and had my food molded and he recommended a 10.5 2E New Balance. Off that recommendation I have exclusively worn NB for the past 20 years. Of course I have dress shoes and a few others but my uniform shoe is a NB lifestyle shoe. Again [as] with the lighters, a shoe carried experience with it. Walking in someone else’s shoes is to get their experience. So I’ve kept quite a bit of my old New Balance shoes… again not exactly sure why at the time I was keeping them. I didn’t know if I would dissect or deconstruct them, use them in sculptures… I started doing sculptures with my old New Balance shoes in 2006-7. I saw a commercial for restless leg syndrome so I made a sculpture with New Balance shoes with one tapping constantly. That was the first time I used them. After that I knew I really needed to keep them for other projects in the future. With these pieces, I accidentally came across the heels by working on another piece, which I am still working on. Sometimes I do a parody or homage to contemporary artists, I’ve referenced Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman. For this shoe piece in process I am referencing Robert Gober’s leg pieces that protrudes from the wall. I needed shoes to come out of the wall, so I cut off the heels. I had these two heels and realized they were really interesting joined together. It references kind of pushing against yourself or working against yourself, inward. Similar to how I feel like I have two brains working against each other. Once I had those heels formed I wanted to create the movement swinging back and forth, constantly moving but going nowhere, stuck in place. Stuck in a headspace. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of the overthinking and move forward. Once I used the heels together I started to work on the toes. Since they naturally have an outward trajectory I wanted them to spin to keep them internal or inward. They have somewhat of a boomerang shape when you put them together so I wanted to make them have a mechanism that revolves and rotates at the same time. It took me quite a few iterations of the mechanism to figure that out because there are two actions going on at once. I did some research but it’s better for me to get in the studio and just do it. If it breaks, start over. Most of my stuff is hands on figuring out. I don’t do well with instructions or schematics. I’ve always tinkered and figured out how things work on my own, taking things apart or building them up and just trying and making it work.  Candy Cigarettes (Van Halen) The title comes from when I was 8 years old, me and a friend were bored and decided to try to smoke candy cigarettes by the railroad tracks just to see what would happen. We saw adults smoking and so we decided these candy cigarettes were kids’ [cigarettes]. We actually got some puffs off them but the sugar melted, I got burnt by the melted sugar. It made us cough and it was not a very fun experience but even at that age, looking back on it, it goes to the curiosity and trying to find new experiences, being bored, trying to find something new, something fresh. The Van Halen shirt… that album came out when I was 8 years old and the cherub smoking ties it back to that experience as well as the 80’s party culture that influenced my youth. The hand is a mold made from my son when he was around that age, 7 to 8. So I’ve had the mold a while and made a couple things, gave him one, it’s just been setting around. I am lucky I took that mold when I did because it lines up perfectly with this piece. And also, a lot of my genes are recessive, so he looks like his mother: dark hair, dark eyes. But a year or two ago when I was driving, he said “Oh my god! Our hands are the same.” We started looking at our hands and they are exactly the same. He has a smaller exact version of my hands. So it’s my hands in a way. This references my playing music and getting into the music of that era, the 80s and 90’s. Starting with the 80s music, I would play “Jump” and jump off my stairs imitating the singer, played Panama the whole way to Daytona… That album has a historical reference with me. The pedestal is a replicates the pattern of one of Van Halen’s most iconic guitars. The color scheme and patterning he did. His most famous signature guitar. I was always partial to the red and black, maybe growing up a U of L fan pushed me in that direction a little more. I wanted to integrate the pedestal into the piece. I try not to use pedestals but if I do they have some kind of relevance to the work. If I need to use a pedestal, I try to figure out how to make it a part of the piece… more meaning than just a display function.  Motivational Paralysis (Rolling Blackout) This one I’ve been working on for quite a while. It started with the eye form which was accidental. I had a piece of mdf that got wet and folded over and I really loved the shape. When I started thinking about the eye, which pops up in a few of my pieces, I started thinking about a certain point when… most people, when they get drunk enough, they are glazed over. But they are still there. You can’t tell what is registering or where they are at. Which to me also references the way my head can get sometimes with motivational paralysis. There are things going on in my brain but I am glazed over, lethargic. To me it’s kind of similar. The stuck, blacked-out phase is very similar to motivational paralysis. Not being able to engage, but you still have awareness. It went through a bunch of iterations in my head as far as how to lay it out. I knew I wanted to have a pupil inside the eye to sit still while the eye was spinning around it, to show it’s still aware.
The liquid… I went with piss color to represent jaundice, tying it back to the glazed over, blacked out state of inebriation. Jaundice was not a concern [for me] but I knew I was destroying my liver. Formally I went with the feel of an old chemistry lab: all the gray steel, wood table tops, that’s the aesthetic I went for. A simple machine with one motor only one step down speed control pulley, to keep it streamlined. Whereas often in my work I incorporate a found object, sometimes that’s the inspiration, sometimes it’s the add on. With this piece, 95% is fabricated by me, only the uprights I did not fabricate. I found those at the shop at U of L. I saw those and knew that I was going to suspend the eye between them. I thought about doing it a bunch of ways, but with decision making problems due to executive dysfunction it made it hard to decide. But when I found the uprights, it was simple and I had something to start with and I thought “I can go from here now.” There are tons of processes and techniques within that one piece: welding, woodworking, machining, upholstery, moldmaking, down to the knobs that are holding things on, I fabricated those as well. The knobs have a mold that has my initials in them, so now I can make a personalized knobs for anything I need. I went all out incorporating material and techniques with this piece but kept it somewhat minimal. The knobs… with my logo/initial, sometimes I have a tendency to work on things I don’t necessarily NEED to work on. I don’t know what that is. Probably executive dysfunction but I think some of it is an excuse for fear of decision making and messing something up. I knew I had a lot of difficult work to do with the pupil of the eye so what did I do? Made molds for piddly stuff that nobody would notice, unless I point it out. I used to constantly build on my studio and things like that in some type of avoidance. I see lots of people do that, find unimportant things to do that have ease and comfort versus the challenging. You are still checking things off and getting stuff done but not what is a higher priority. I do this so I can notice it in others. I’ve struggled with a lot of these issues and had to figure it out myself, so if I can help people overcome the things I struggled with, that’s very fulfilling. That’s one of the things I enjoy about teaching, and helping people. [About teaching] I leave my projects open with my students but I also give them prompts to choose from if needed. I am aware from my personal experience, sometimes too much freedom is limiting because it becomes hard to figure out where to start. It’s like trying to figure out what you want to eat, you can have Chinese and Mexican and… you have so many options. I tell my students they can make whatever they want and then half the students don’t know what to do, so I have prompts they can fall back on if needed. When I was in school I felt things were too structured, I would be bored before I started. So I would focus on pushing the parameters, or see if I can skirt them or change them, and still be within but right on the edge. This was possibly a way for me to divert the focus from talking about personal stuff to talking about the parameters in my critiques. Now I give them (students) freedom so I don’t end up debating with a younger contrarian like myself about parameters over and over. So we don’t have to have the discussion so much about what the project was [supposed to be] like I did to my professors. Comments are closed.
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