Born 1957, Sarnia, ON
The recent paintings and animations of Stephen Andrews are elegant in their craftsmanship and unsettling in the manner they suggest the manipulative potential of mass media reportage. Andrews' pointillist paintings of car crashes, military ground exercises, deer caught in headlights or mass social events suggest the impossibility of knowing the circumstances and contexts of what they depict. Media depictions, like that 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. Void of any meaning, the imagination reels in the gallery or battlefield as the growing potential of desire in Andrews' subjects causes the eyes' pupils to widen and ears to prick up. Andrews presents over 500 drawings in conjunction with an animation. The concentration on materials (a limited colour palette, pointillist/ pixel patterning, stop-action animation) makes apparent how his chosen materials mimic the resilience of mass-media representation, its surfaces and implied forms and motions just as mysterious and ubiquitous. Andrews' animation loops similarly follow a circular path of revelation so that one returns to square one in a couple minutes or less, like an incessant news report, as a short circuiting image factory.
www.platformgallery.com
www.paulpetro.com