Past Exhibitions

Forecast: Stephen Andrews

September 6 - October 9, 2006

Image: Stephen Andrews, "Friendly Fire" 2005

Curated by: Sarah Stanners

Salah J. Bachir has been an ardent supporter of Stephen Andrew’s work for over ten years now. Selected from what is the largest private collection of art by Andrews, this exhibition at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery brings works in a variety of media (oil, latex, crayon, silkscreen print, and animation) into conversation with each other and the viewer. Themes of war and weather emerge into the works, intersecting each other in their physical appearance and in their subtle suggestion of subjects that forecast mortality and questions the storm of images that we negotiate daily.

Our experience of both war and weather is akin to being affected by the sublime – we often cannot predict or fathom the force at hand. Andrews’ Friendly Fire (2003) suspends our attention with what looks like beach balls along a sunny shoreline but is actually a bloody scene of the results of war. Using a method of reproduction that translates actual photographic or film media into a handmade simulation of the four-colour separation process of printing, Andrews’ meditation of the visual allows us to step to the very edge of the sublime by encouraging our presumption of safety; all the while we are, in fact, facing the terrible.

Andrews employs a level of abstraction in order to bring us in touch with the horror – a requirement that Edmund Burke pointed out long ago: “To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary, When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.” (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1759.) Andrews’ work is sensitive to this condition; we can become apathetic when bombarded with imagery. In his many work that deal with the war in Iraq, Andreas is trying to create a pause where we might realize the impact of a pivotal moment.

By obscuring the image, the artist persuades us to consider its reflections more carefully. Andrews elaborated on his motivations:

I think that our relationship to images is one of disposability. If we’re looking at images of war – and there are thousands of them we must remember that they are actual photographs of those before-and-after moments in people’s lives. Moments when everything changes…. How would one go about recuperating these moments and valorizing them?... Stopping them so that we will actually look at them and see what’s wrong with our relationship to these situations?... [And] how that might lead to a kind of action rather than reaction. (Stephen Andrews, interview with Sarah Stanners, digital audio recording. Toronto: March 22, 2005.)

Speaking of his artist-patron relationship with Bachir, Andrews says, “We share a politic.” Both are advocates of social awareness, and many of the works by Andrews may be interpreted as a call to action.

By the mid 1990s, the AIDS epidemic had already claimed thousands lives and came very close to taking Andrews’ own. With illness, like war and weather, there can be a sharp contrast between one’s expectations and the actual outcome. In 1995 Andrews began his process of resurrection. He recalls this critical time in his battle with the virus:

I was actually quite ill, and it seemed like the end of the road for me at that point in time. We were kayaking and we had been paddling for 40km when we turned into this bay…. We stopped paddling and we just turned into the setting sun. I couldn’t see anything, everything was pure light and I thought, ‘Oh this is what death is like.’ However, it’s not the end, it’s just coming out of a period of darkness. Out of the tunnel, in a way. And I guess I knew at that point that I would go back home and get on medication and live. (Stephen Andrews, interview with Sarah Stanners, digital audio recording. Toronto: March 22, 2005.)

At this crucial turning point he “couldn’t see anything,” and yet he was struck by a need to take action. In these selected works by Stephen Andrews, the forecast is, by intention, not clear.

Sarah Stanners, Curator

 

Events:

Tuesday September 12: Stephen Andrews in conversation with Alex Nagel (Art History Professor, University of Toronto)

Sunday September 24: Curator's tour of the exhibition

 

Installation views:

Forecast: Stephen Andrews @ Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, 2006