Purchase Aspen Mays' fine print from 2022 and receive a free copy of her signed contact sheet from her 2014 exhibition at Light Work, Aspen Mays: Newspaper Rock. Please note the frame is not included.
Contact Sheet
Contact Sheet 175: Aspen Mays
Publisher: Light Work (January 2014)
Aspen Mays approaches her art-making practice with some of the same methods she learned acquiring a degree in anthropology. By embracing the art and science of photography her projects often begin by tracking down information, ideas, and experts in a variety of fields, including astronomy. She collects, unearths, and creates images and objects that celebrate the complex and sublime beauty of the physical universe. Her images question our capacity to comprehend, while expressing our deep desire to find meaning in the unknown.
Her fieldwork has included a year in Chile in the Atacama desert and in Santiago at the University of Chile’s National Observatory, known locally as Cerro Calán. Because of its high altitude, dry air, and almost non-existent clouds, the Atacama desert of Chile is one of the best places in the world to conduct astronomical observations. In the desert, with only the naked eye, Mays could view the night sky in stunning clarity and detail. “The Milky Way is so bright in the desert that it casts a shadow on the ground,” she says. As she stood in the light she realized, “I knew something that is impossible to know, an awareness of how tiny I am and how connected.”
Fine Print
Dodging Tool 47, 2022
Silver gelatin print, 11×14” image on 11x14" paper
Edition of 40, signed and numbered by the artist
In 2010, Aspen Mays started her collection of dodging tools with several that she found in an abandoned darkroom at the National Astronomical Observatory in Chile during a Fulbright Fellowship. The collection has since grown to include dodging tools from darkroom across the world. Mays first began making photograms of her collection for this ongoing series during her 2012 residency at Light Work. This special edition print was made with an elaborate tool discovered in the darkroom at Light Work. Mays returned to Syracuse to create the print and says it is “the most remarkable dodging tool she’s ever seen.” Mays continues, “while some tools seem to be made for printing very specific images –fitting the photograph almost like a lock and key– they are often left behind as a helpful offering to other darkroom users. I came to think of their improvisational character as sharing a common tool-making impulse, all in service to the subjective nature of seeing”.
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Aspen Mays grew up in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2004. Her solo exhibitions include Every leaf on a tree at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; From the Offices of Scientists at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Sun Ruins at Golden Gallery, New York; and Ships that Pass in the Night at the Center for Ongoing Projects and Research (COR&P) in Columbus, OH. Mays was a 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellow in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. Mays lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Columbus, OH where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Ohio State University.