• Gavin Anderson - Statement | CV | Works

April 13, 2009

Mass media and population dynamics are rapidly changing spiritual, intellectual, and environmental terrain. Mental and physical contours are merging. Connectivity between individuals, humanity, and nature pervade the shifting landscape, either through direct cause-and-effect or remote interaction; with increasing speed, narrow actions possess the potential for immense influence and inversely cumulative events manipulate finite outcomes. These incongruous relationships generate the boundless terra incognita that my paintings, sculptures, and drawings explore.

My aim is to capture the thoughts and visions that reflect the pivotal psychology and physiology of that protean landscape, and realize them as closely to their origin as my ability allows, regardless of style, genre, and form. This practice results in visually diverse work, pliable enough to communicate the tangible and nebulous boundaries of that active topography. By arranging the works in installations, I balance creative liberty with curatorial structure to evoke intuitive tableaus in which individual pieces, with their own intrinsic logic and potential to stand alone, must vie for autonomy and position within the greater meaning of a collective whole.

Influenced equally by nature, pop culture, and art history, my work combines the three with broad formal and conceptual latitude in two and three-dimensional space. Paint and marks become spatial, and sculptures flatten into the wall. Potent fragments from our discordant collective conscious entwine with my own conviction to create imagery that seems both ubiquitous and rarified. A Technicolor palette and familiar forms unfold into flawed abstractions and esoteric meditations. Recurring motifs of chaotic architecture, corrupted landscapes, anthropomorphic animals, broken shadows, suspect food, supernatural masks and dislocated monuments exude contemporary angst with the conflicted disposition of a comic tragedy or macabre romance.

My amorphous aesthetic is a gut response to the saturated visual landscape, littered by the flotsam of search engines and divergent histories, in which singularity and originality are instantly linked and consumed by a maelstrom of associations. Through my work, I strive to suspend classification and disrupt associations long enough to establish genuine expressions that convey the vacillant nature of an individual’s relationship to collective influence and vice versa. To do that I have abandoned conventional ideas of artistic continuity, based on developing a unique perspective through similarity and sequential logic within a given technique and medium, for a more instinctive, pluralistic approach, which relies on the mind’s innate ability to process and form a unified understanding from varied, simultaneous information sources.