View from Above
Stephen Andrews
Oil on canvas
February 3 - March 12, 2011
Illingworth Kerr Gallery | ACAD
Reception | February 3, 2011
The recent paintings and print editions by Stephen Andrews are elegant in their craftsmanship and unsettling in the manner at which they suggest the manipulative potential of mass media reportage. Andrews’ recent pointillist paintings of car crashes, military groundexercises, deer caught in headlights or mass social events suggest the impossibility of knowing the circumstances and contexts of what they depict. Media depictions, like those of the artist, are mediated, generative photographic evidence. They manifest a complete lack of knowing with certainty anything at all about everyday objects and desires. A withdrawal of meaning can send the imagination reeling in both gallery and battlefield as the growing potential of desire and fear causes pupils to widen and ears to prick up.