GLARE by Aurele Gould

About the artist: Aurele Gould is an image maker based in Richmond, VA with a BFA in Photography + Film from Virginia Commonwealth University. Aurele has recently finished an artist residency with the Visual Arts Center of Richmond in 2021, received the 2020 VMFA Professional Fellowship Award, received the Distinguished Photographer Award from Alex Klein of the ICA Philadelphia, and was awarded Best in Show by the VCU Photo department for the 2019 thesis exhibit Photo Velvet.

From the artist: "Why do grief, love, desire, restraint, control, sex, and disgust all fill the same space. I can’t separate them and they converge in my body, unconsciously, waiting to knock, for when my thoughts still. GLARE is used as a link between the intangible past and present through photographic motifs. I revolve around certain words and how they can function to have several meanings, like ‘inversion’ being an outdated term for homosexuality but a current term for a reversal, or ‘glare’ being light reflection or an intense stare. The multiple implications of words becomes the basis for constructing a visual narrative from a queer perspective. Reflecting vs Reflection, Glance vs Glare. As intangible, light-based concepts, they analyze how ‘inversion’ and ‘glare’ can be used to weave between a constructed reality and a lived experience. Caught between two worlds– dreaming and awakeness– I wrote GLARE to untangle why death, sex, grief, and love seem to all twist together at night."