Aaron Christopher Rees
(b. 1986, Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Aaron Christopher Rees is an artist working in the realm of photography and the moving image. Through process-based photographic and structuralist video techniques of making, his practice explores our embodied experiences of being in the world – and how visual technologies like cameras can shape and alter that experience.

Sleep walker, 2022, is a photographic installation that builds on the artist’s contribution to the State of Disruption exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2022, and Horizon at Caves Gallery in 2021. For this new commission, Rees presents a series of hand-printed photographs within a transparent red ‘corridor’. The structure acts as a site of fractional encounters and as a large-scale aperture that frames and reframes the works of both Rees and, temporarily, the surrounding artists, as visitors navigate the space. The result is an effect recalling the experience of being inside a darkroom, with the transformation of all that is viewed through the walls into pure red, but also the uncanny shifting position of the visitor, who is both voyeur and someone viewed when passing through the corridor. This work continues Rees’s exploration into altered states of vision, through image making and architectural intervention. 

Rees completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, in 2015. He has exhibited internationally and interstate, with recent notable exhibitions including Firmament at NAP Contemporary, States of Disruption at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Horizon at Caves Gallery, and not for the sake of something more at Sarah Scout Presents. Rees has also exhibited as a part of PHOTO 2021, Spring 1883, and the Channels and Next Wave contemporary art festivals. In 2021 he was the recipient of the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize.