Aron John Dubois
Fertile Cave

August 21 – October 2, 2021

The Valley is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Aron John Dubois, an internationally recognized tattoo artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While his tattoo work has garnered much acclaim over the 10+ years he has worked in the industry, Dubois is an outsider to the contemporary art world more broadly. This exhibition is his first solo presentation, an exercise in exploring his practice and voice beyond tattooing and experimenting with new materials and techniques. He prefers working on paper because of its accessibility, ephemerality, and impermanence; and enjoys how works on paper feel much like an artifact when behind glass, like an object of anthropological interest. Utilizing layered watercolor, ink, and gouache, he creates compositions intuitively utilizing a symbolic language born of his own mythology and spiritual inquiry. He finds that the narrative or meaning of the work isn’t revealed until after the work is completed, but the impetus or sense of the desired expression exists before he begins, usually only in general form or composition. The process of creating his paintings is often surprising, raw, and sometimes hostile, continually tempering fear through working.

The title of the exhibition, Fertile Cave, is a reference to the unconscious mind. In Dubois’ symbolic language, inspired by studies of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, the cave (or the unconscious) can represent human kind’s primal origin and end-point. Not solely because it was the dwelling of early humans, but because the cave, symbolically, is an earth-womb; the entrance to, or exit from, the enigma that gives life. It is the gate of existence, a portal to death and birth. Fertile Cave includes a series of new paintings and sculptural works that explore the core duality of human experience: being embodied as both a spirit and a body, living in the earthly world while also desiring transcendence from our physical form. 

For Dubois, nature is the place that gives form, both physically and spiritually, to this duality. In each of the ten paintings in the exhibition, ephemera from the natural world dance in spirals, winding and twisting together in symbolic dialogue. Eggs for enigma, phallus’ for nature’s might, stones for eternity, thorns for survival, plants for communion, serpents for rebirth, bestiary for spirit. Elevating these humble objects and creatures to talismans of universal significance, their meaning connects our world with spiritual realms within and beyond our reach, reminding us that just as our bodies are containers for our individual souls and spiritual matter, they also hold a remnant of cosmic source material. The sculptural works included in Fertile Cave are also tools for searchers, suggesting rituals and rites of the artists’ own design. Staves used for walking through deep and wild woods, or to guide on a journey to the underworld. An exalted egg, bringing forward the allegory of the unconscious mind: the idea waiting to be born, the darkness within a space of creation.   

To Dubois, the most important task of the artist is to make the spirit visible. Fertile Cave thus endeavors this by exploring the tension between the corporeal body and spiritual longing, and sharing a path to spiritual growth shown to human beings through communing with the cycles inherent in nature.