commune

12(tue) – 27(wed) Nov, 2019

At gallery commune

The initial inspiration for this body of work was the cover of the 1966 reprint of George Oppen’s book of poems. By culling through over a century for source material, I’m interested not so much in nostalgia as in how an aesthetic language can come to signify a specific historical moment, how these visual associations can be altered or combined to create something new. I think a lot about Peter Saville using Fantin-Latrour’s painting for the cover of the New Order album Power Corruption & Lies, or the appropriated images used on The Smith’s album covers. I’m interested in how changes in technology—the invention of photography, the silkscreen, the Xerox machine—create aesthetic changes. The final environment, I hope, is a series of liminal images that appear simultaneously dated and out of time, to capture moments between moments, a sense of anticipation of an event or the calm after an event has passed. Something like the moment before falling asleep or a sense of waking from a dream.

Discrete Series is a series of drawings that I hope work together to create a mood or environment, but also exist independently as isolated images, removed from specific historical situations. I call the resulting groups of images “compilations,” a sort of visual mix tape. The arrangement of images is something like my bedroom as a teenager, which was filled with images clipped from magazines, of bands or writers that I admired. By thinking of these drawings as a series, the work has become more about the relationship between the images and connections that the viewer creates when encountering them, connections that I cannot control. Traces of my own hand are visible throughout these drawings, as are traces of the materials I use to create them: ink, acrylic, carbon pencil, charcoal, but I try to hew closely to the original image in a hope to make the viewer pause and wonder about the creation of these pieces, about what exactly they are, a drawing, a painting or a print. I have recently been mounting the drawings to panels, in lieu of framing, to make the experience of them more direct and to make these drawings on paper appear more like paintings or objects.

Andy Mister has recently mounted solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery and Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York City. His work has been included in group exhibitions in many galleries throughout the US including: Joshua Liner Gallery, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Dieu Donné, Lesley Heller Workspace, and The National Arts Club. He has published two books, Heroes & Villains (Cultural Society, 2015), a book of drawings, and Liner Notes (Station Hill, 2013). He has been awarded residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Bemis Center. In 2020 he will have solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery (New York) and Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco). He lives and works in Beacon, NY.
andymister.com |@helensaidthis