subject

Stephen Andrews

Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt

The recent paintings and print editions that comprise subject are elegant in their craftsmanship and unsettling in the manner in which they reflect on the manipulative potential of mass media reportage. Andrews' paintings of car crashes, military ground exercises, explosions or mass social events suggest the impossibility of knowing the circumstances and contexts of what they depict. Mass media transmissions, like those of the artist, are mediated, generative photographic evidence, their form, content and meaning in flux, their basic matrix dot formations veering towards abstraction. The subtle play of abstract and figurative elements in media reportage manifests itself ultimately as a void, a complete lack of knowing with certainty anything at all about everyday objects, desires and actions. A withdrawal of meaning is Andrews' calculated strategy to blend technique, materials and the worked surfaces while ultimately suggesting a critique of their contradictory but component parts. 

Stephen Andrews

Stephen Andrews was born in 1956 is Sarnia, Ontario Canada. Over the last twenty-five years he has exhibited his work in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Scotland, France and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Belkin Art Gallery, the Schwartz Collection, Harvard as well as many private collections. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including drawing, animation, and recently, paining.