Aaron Spangler: Sweeping Up The Shadows

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to present Sweeping Up The Shadows, a solo exhibition project by Aaron Spangler for the Ojai Institute. The exhibition will be on view November 12, 2022 – February 25, 2023. Spangler is the recipient of the 2022 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize.

Aaron Spangler (b. 1971, Minneapolis) is a sculptor and printmaker best known for his monumental, monochromatic carved wooden sculptures and for resuscitating and contemporizing the traditional art of bas relief. His themes emerge from his roots in a heavily forested area of northern Minnesota, and began in darkly calamitous, intricately carved wood bas relief. Painted black with gesso and rubbed with graphite, the surfaces appear to be machined, the surrealistic scenes–of twisted tree roots, limbs, and extinct hand tools–illustrating, or presaging, various breakdowns of rural society. Since moving back home to his house and studio in the Two Inlets Forest in Minnesota in 2009, his work has grown in a more smoothly abstracted, heavily patterned, and intimate direction. In bas relief, freestanding sculpture, and woodblock and hand-rubbed prints, he continues to explore and provoke the ineffable truths and mythologies of the rural ethos. Click here to read more