Daily Inspiration: Meet AURESCENT

Today we’d like to introduce you to AURESCENT.

AURESCENT, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started making before I made like a name I work under AURESCENT, and I’ve always been surrounded by and made glam-camp vibing art in some way. It’s how my brain sees in like Technicolor I guess.

In 2022, a study came out about how the world is becoming more desaturated, and I think that sucks. I’m in the margin of people who are like, saturate everything with texture and color. I want to live in the Oz part of The Wizard of Oz, not the Kansas part, or in a John Waters movie. To quote SpongeBob S2 E25, I strongly believe in “Food… water… atmosphere!” I paint sets for photography and video, and I’ve painted since I was like 11-12. I work with vintage and have for a long time, and paint, and find the tactile experience so important, omg—but all of this adds to my practice and work ethos. It’s both part of and pushes back against a highly digitized, removed, dead-internet media landscape when part of being human is sense—touch, feeling, physical and subliminal, as to desensitization.


I have, like, core memories with my grandma who was an artist her whole life—drawing on scrap paper in the Great Depression, and though she dreamed of being an illustrator for Hudson’s department store catalogues, she pursued art personally and painted like psychedelic nude mannequins, really intricate work on board and canvas, and had work at the Scarab Club in Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, including a deactivated WWII bomb in protest of the Vietnam War. A main thing I remember personally is my grandma making paper dolls with me, and bringing me ones that were hers from the 1930s that I still have. A lot of drawing and playing dress up, and watching Old Hollywood films is like what wired my brain being like “how can I get paid for that and do it every day?”

There’s this photo set with Carole Lombard by Travis Banton (I think) where she’s reflected in multiple mirrors, black and white that is wired in my brain of being like “that’s a PHOTO,” that I can trace to a core memory of sitting at my grandma’s built-in Art Deco style vanity, infinitely reflected in the surrounding mirrors. The dressing-room-style lighting fixture became an infinite dotted light orb, making this, like, fantasy trippy image, and as a I remember thinking I wanted to like capture that moment with art as life—and then as an adult, I can just make these like sets and images exist from nothing and put more visual glitter in the world (creating is kind of like calculated magic, you know?).



Besides the Art Deci gazing pool mirrors, in, like, dichotomy, movies I watched at a young age were early and silent horror and monster films—Dracula (Bela Lugosi), Creature from the Black Lagoon, Gorgo, Godzilla, Ray Harryhausen films on my parents’ tube TV in the ’90s, so you get that chromatic aberration too. The visuals stuck with me before I could read, that, and ‘90s/2000s Halloween commercials and specials.

To answer how I got where I am today, I’d say I’m still working toward exactly where I’d want to be, but getting as far as I have is kind of an anomaly—working mostly in creative fields—I just show up and work and keep doing that. Having a vision of what I want in my life keeps me going, and how I see the world as like still frames and cinema. Having an amazing community I’m able to work with is a big part of it, too in/around Detroit and outside of that. Just continuing to play and find wonder in things, whether it’s editorial or branding, really.


I work under AURESCENT as my business because photography is painting with light, aurora borealis is an experience in person I’m very much like “THAT” about if that makes sense, and aurum is gold in Latin, which is what I make for clients and galleries.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s definitely been an uphill battle since being like “yes this is what I’m doing”; the world might have less color saturation but the market for artists and creatives is extra ultra saturated, now more than ever with everything being so accessible (for better or worse in some aspects). But you just have to keep going, because a lot people don’t.

I feel there’s a lot of pressure maybe more than ever to be like super young and an immediate viral protégée hit, but quite a few of those stories are like nepo-babies who are suddenly on the scene because their parent owns a publication or is a movie producer. I have to be my own nepo-baby-parent. Again, accessibility and the fast turnaround of constant information is both an advantage and disadvantage. Everyone can make stuff and have ideas, but how far are you willing to go? Social media has been lately in a weird spot too where Gen Z and Millenials (myself included) especially made their livelihood and connects off there and in the current digital landscape, and with two decades or so increasingly sort of loss on physical media/spaces, it’ll be interesting to see where things go from there in marketing an image businesses.

Personally, as to just being and making in online spaces, outside of client work, I’ve been focused on galleries, prints, publications, and in-person networking. It’s an ongoing process and ongoing learning. But you have to just kind of be a shark and keep going or end up dead in the water if you stagnate for too long.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
AURESCENT is what I go by for work, I specialize in stylized imagery and creative direction, blending tactile with digital, incorporating my background in set work, styling, analogue techniques, and mixed media to create immersive, cinematic imagery. My work pushes against an increasingly desaturated, algorithm-driven landscape by embracing texture, color, and the physicality of imagery through crafting environments (whether wearables, lighting, or sets) and narratives. Also, I know, cliché but the female/femme gaze is an important part of what I do.

I think what sets me apart is my approach—I work in multiple mediums, from painting and analog photo to digital photography and video, but I think they all inform each other. I find the tactile experience of working hands-on crucial to what I do, whether its editorial work, branding campaign, or gallery work; from building mood boards and styling sessions with clients, to hand-painting or sewing garments, set pieces, and canvases—a lot of my process is in-camera, such as light projections, lensing, and in camera filters; it’s important to me to make work that feels rich, tangible, and atmospheric, especially in an increasingly bot-filled-graveyard digital landscape that surrounds us all and at our fingertips on the daily, a little space of escapism when and where I can.

I’m especially proud of the spaces I’ve been able to carve out and continue to work in—not just in my own work, but in the creative community I work and collab with—other creatives, especially lgbtq+ creators, women-run businesses, and a lot of pretty cool companies, makers, and galleries—from accessories and lingerie, to the cannabis industry. It’s a constant process of building, refining, and experimenting, but part of the product is the process getting there, especially with media work.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Honestly, other than what I previously shared, like monster movies and drawing fashion dresses or dolls, I don’t have a lot memories of my childhood until like high school school where I was involved theatre and still did art. I got my first film camera when I was around 16, a 70s Minolta 35mm, and around the same time I got my first DSLR and just went from there in photo work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.aurescent.studio
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aurescent/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Aurescent/61564419714757/?_rdr

Image Credits
Photo of AURESCENT by Nomadic Madam

All other photos by AURESCENT