Kevin Van Aelst holds an MFA in photography from the University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT and a BA in psychology from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He currently teaches photography at Quinnipiac University in Hamden and at the ACES/ECA arts magnet high school in New Haven. Besides the recent Art and Math group show at Axiom Gallery in Jamaica Plain, MA, Van Aelst's exhibitions include solo showings at the Khaki Gallery in Wellesley, MA and Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. Recently awarded a Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism Artist Fellowship Grant, his work is included in Connecticut-based collections such as the Wadsworth Atheneum and Artspace.

Van Aelst's constructed, often humorous, photo illustrations can be seen weekly in “The Medium” column of the New York Times Magazine. Featured online is a selection of mathematically and scientifically-inspired, constructed images as well as a series of his recreated fingerprints in sites of childhood memories.

  - Leslie K. Brown, PRC Curator

Click here for Van Aelst's Web site
Click here to see his editorial work

Artist Statement

My photographs consist of everyday objects, foods, and materials that I have constructed and arranged into various patterns. The content of the photographs are mundane artifacts of life—things that we are all familiar with—including donuts, cassette tape, coffee, and sweater lint. These materials have been set up, built, carved, and bitten, so that larger systems of visual information are illustrated. Despite being rendered in an unconventional way, the content is legible and the information is valid. While star charts made from lint on a sweater, a fingerprint drawn with sugar, and street maps made out of broken glass are novel ways of presenting information, they contain the same data and visual efficacy as the typical depictions.

This body of work is about creating order where randomness is expected. Natural disorder is defied; so that the sprinkles on donuts depict the stages of cell division, and milk poured into coffee illustrate common cloud formations. Equally important to this body of work is humor —via odd juxtapositions of sophisticated content with banal subject matter. The objects used to create these pieces are all mundane and common parts of modern life, but the concepts illustrated therein are timeless and lofty ideas, culled from biology, chemistry, and fractal geometry.

This process involves finding materials that bear a certain semblance to common scientific illustrations and visual displays—hair stuck to the wall of a shower having the same curving line quality as a fingerprint, gummy worms having the same shape as chromosomes, and an Oreo cookie having the same shape and colors as a yin yang.

Click on each image for larger version and caption.

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