Aaron Spangler

The Hideaway is a bas-relief - a complex, Romanesque technique that marries aspects of two-dimensional imagery with those of three-dimensional sculpture – in carved maple wood. A light wood, it is painted by the artist in black gesso and covered in graphite to give the finished work an appearance not dissimilar to Ghiberti’s Baptistry doors in Florence. At bottom left the artist has portrayed his own home in Minnesota, at bottom right the Nebraska home and an imagined military hummer. All about them a canopy of trees crash with flailing roots, the victims, like perspective itself, of some terrible storm. A dark, baroque fiction roughly hewn with basic carpenter’s tools, it presents a strange, unfamiliar, burnt scene of rural Armageddon.