Aaron Canipe is an artist and curator based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He recently published his first monograph called ‘Plateau’, part of his MFA thesis in Experimental & Documentary Arts at Duke University. Canipe earned his BFA in fine art photography from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2012. Canipe’s work is focused on the North Carolina landscape, it’s people, and places within. He’s the co-founder of the DIY publishing outfit, Empty Stretch.
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About ‘Plateau’:
“‘Here is the month of April 1904. Here is the courthouse bell and three o’clock. Here is Grover on the Square that never changes. Here is Grover, caught at this point of time.’ It seemed to him that the Square, itself the accidental mason many years, the chance agglomeration of time and of disrupted strivings, was the center of the universe. It was for him, in his soul’s picture, the earth’s pivot, the granite core of changelessness, the eternal place where all things came and passed, and yet abode forever and would never change.” — Thomas Wolfe, The Lost Boy
Like Wolfe’s narrator, my series ‘Plateau’ is an exploration of local places within the piedmont of North Carolina. The term plateau is at once a nod to the topographical term, a portion of relatively high and flat ground between hills, an adjective describing a period of neither progression or decline, and the name of the road where I went to school in Catawba County, North Carolina, Plateau Road. The portraits, landscapes, and still lives made for this project are in ceaseless transition, worn by industry, time, erosion, and the weather. ‘Plateau’ is the story of feeling lost in one’s own home as well as coping with the loss of innocence. As photographs can only do, these moments are seen eternally in a “granite core of changelessness”, as well as in between progression and decline and adolescence and adulthood.
