Aspen Mays
Hugo 3, 2018
Gelatin silver photogram collage, dye, mounted to green Sintra,
22 x 18 inches
Unique, signed, on mount
Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures Generation
Estimated value: $4,000
When I was a child in 1989, Hurricane Hugo hit my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, and destroyed my elementary school. Surveying the vast destruction, I witnessed a sense of wild, catastrophic possibility, resilience, and vulnerability that has had a life-long effect on me as an artist. In many ways that experience has guided my approach to photography; my work has long been engaged with the material tenuity of photographic processes and photographic archives.
In studying satellite images of Hugo, I made this series of photogram collages using saturated fabric dyes to reference the false color assigned to coded emergency alerts and Doppler radar images. Using cameraless abstraction, they also reference cartoonish depictions of violence and weather map symbology.
Image by Taylor Kay Johnson
About the Artist:
Aspen Mays
Aspen Mays was raised in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in anthropology and Spanish from University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. She is currently an associate professor and chair of undergraduate photography at California College of the Arts. She is represented by Higher Pictures Generation in New York, and her recent honors include a 2021 Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mays was also a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky, an experience that has made a lasting impact on her work.
Website: aspenmays.com | higherpictures.com
Instagram: @aspenmays | @higherpicturesgeneration
