TEMPTER PIECES
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work explores painting as both a tool and an object of its own making. Through a method of cutting, printing, and folding paper, I traverse the relationship between serial production and a unique object, investigating possibilities of chance and chaos. I am interested in this iterative action and its kinship to biological autopoiesis: each element of the object is used to simultaneously produce, reproduce and obliterate itself, suggesting a lifecycle. Each work is a static picture of an evolving universe. In this process lies a narrative of the object’s desire to survive and grow while concurrently folding into a state of disintegration.
As a kid growing up in NYC, my sense of the natural world was dominated by representations and symbols of nature in signs, magazines, and other images that could be purchased from the corner store. Like the bouquets that lined the sidewalk outside these fluorescent-lit shops, “nature” was commodified and altered for the human interior. Rather than allowed to be in a cycle of growth and decay, it was sequestered to the “human museum”. With a nod to Vanitas painting, my work reflects the abundance of the natural and made world, but instead of reminding viewers of mortality, I aim to lift the viewer above the polyphonic hubbub of everyday life and into a manic sense of contemporary transcendence.
BIO:
Reed Anderson (b.1969, NYC) studied painting at the Cleveland Institute of art with Julian Stanczak and after 3 years transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute where he graduated with a BFA in Printmaking. Anderson attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and after a decade of living and working in Brooklyn, attended Stanford University and Graduated with an MFA in studio art in 2009. Anderson currently lives and works in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Reed Anderson has been exhibiting work across disciplines nationally and internationally for over 25 years and his work is in public collections that include MOMA, NYC; Albright-Knox, Buffalo; The West Collection, Philadelphia; The Olbricht collection, Essen Germany and The Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Austria among numerous private collections
