His art—including recent bodies of work A Spectacular Fall, Shadow Root, and Envisioning the Land—explores the tension between nature and the consequence of Manifest Destiny’s impulse to dominate the land. He has exhibited, delivered papers, and spoken about his work both nationally and internationally. Work from his recent series, Reconsidering Landscape, was included in the 2008 Focal Press book, Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age. Ariaz received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Following graduate school, Ariaz lived briefly on each coast—in Los Angeles and New York—before settling in the South in 2006.