The Irrational Season, 2005

“If the dark prophets who infuriated the people of the Establishment in their own day have anything to say to me today, it is through their constant emphasizing that God is so free of his own creation that he can transform us in our pain into a community of people who are able to be free of the very establishments which are formed in his name. For these establishments inevitably begin to institutionalize God’s love and then he teaches us (put my tears in your bottle) what love really is—not our love, not what we want God’s love to be, but God’s love.”

 – The Irrational Season, a book by Madeleine L’Engle

The paintings in the art exhibit The Irrational Season utilize the imagery of traditional icon painting but altar the images blurring the boundaries between male and female, as well as obscuring ethnicity. Layering paint, seeking to expose the movement and fallibility of the first lines laid down, as well as creating vibrant color palettes seek to reveal both the flat nature of the material and the meditation in the painting process.

 

As Comfortable As I Can Be, 2006

The installation, As Comfortable As I Can Be, depicts the struggle of grief with chronic illness.  Spatially, the installation evokes a sense of communal movement while offering moments of intimate introspection upon individual art pieces. Disease in an individual's life can restructure identity. One relational component of this restructuring is the sometimes symbiotic, other times parasitic coexistence of the human body and the disease. The interaction between the female figurative and biomorphic growth-like forms are used to emphasize the push and pull of illness versus health and grief versus acceptance.

The hanging fabric panels and pillow are used to define the space and intent of the installation as a whole. The formation of the space, created by the fabric panels and stone placements, create circular pathways by which an audience may view the work.  The pillow in the center mirrors traditions focally bound to a "sacred center".  These elements exist within labyrinths and are religiously emblematic of coming to an altar. Used environmentally, with the ambient audio loop, these concepts evoke a meditative surrounding.

 

Digging Through The Wall, 2008

Dear MS:

You have been very uncomfortable; I know this goes without saying, but saying it somehow validates me. You have taken so much time from me, that is worse than the discomfort- I, like everyone else, am only given a single lifetime and you are stealing what amounts to years. You have taken away certainty in my body, in my perception, and in my God. It is very selfish of you. I have chosen to keep what you have not taken. I won’t give you my confidence, my hope, my desires and laughter although I know you’d gladly accept them. I have chosen to make art about you, about my struggle with you, about how others struggle with you and your invasive friends disease and death.

I have chosen organic imagery to represent you, I regret defiling the beauty of nature with your invasive and destructive personality, but it is most like you of anything I know. It can engulf, encase, encompass and defile; it can grow untamed though we may try to control it. You are much the same. You can both speak with the vocabulary of a parasite.

Admittedly you have blessed me with perspective. Perhaps, MS, that is your one true beauty. You have opened my eyes to new colors, more tender moments, and the ability to honor the fragility of life. I thank you for that, I know I could not love the way I do now without your presence. It is a dichotomy, but one I shall live with.

My art suffers the same fate. It must live with this dichotomous reality, to accept the repulsive and acknowledge the beauty there in. It must know the fallibility of the human form and live with the growth of organic matter. It must accept a parasite as a symbiot.

I am sorry MS that I wish for your demise, I pray that a scientist will discover your true nature and wipe you from existence. Until that time I shall accept you as an unwanted guest, and speak to others about your ways in words and symbol. You have become the impetus of my visual language. I must admit I look forward to a time when they’ll be nothing to say.                           

Sincerely, Andrea

 

Medical Kitsch,  2009

It is The Medical Body and The Medical Object that I seek to examine in my current sculptural work.  Employing a dismodernist aesthetic, as well as an anti-hierarchical view of art and craft materials, my artwork uses internal and external medical imagery of the body, along with appropriated found medical objects to synthesize the narratives of a diseased body and everyday human ritual. This is intended to illuminate questions about the contemporary conceptions of illness, body image in relation to physical, mental and emotional impairment, as well as the imposition of the medical object upon the daily act of living. The intertextual nature of the fine arts, disease, the conceptual craft movement, the role of the medical body, personal narrative, and the role of chronic illness in disabilities studies leaves me drawing from many contexts fashioning a tool with many handles. Siphoning through this robust dialogue for an artistic identify results in a complex web of history and influence. It is this web that creates the platform on which I make art.

 

Hem Me In, 2010

My current body of artwork, Hem Me In, at its core is a story of a question.  My question. 

How can a chronically ill body be a whole and healed body?

My history holds in its belly years of Conceptual Craft, a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, and a Christian faith.  It is from these life experiences that I draw the conceptual framework for my art objects and installations.

How do I make sense of this diseased body I have been given, the experience it undergoes within the medical field and the daily struggle to live a redeemed life?  It is a struggle to trust disabled and faulty flesh, and come to terms with the objects in my life that act as signifiers in this experience.  My work is about my experience as a Medical Body wrestling with Medical Objects, assimilating visually as a normate knowing my brain is slowly being scarred by a disease I cannot see.

This body of work is a search for answers, a hope that healing lives in the release and acknowledgment of my struggle. A struggle which at its core, is a question.