Andy Boat

Statements

(Fragment_Fig002.2014)

“Where do we go? … What do we do?”

-Openness pilots the skiff.

“It must be this way, I feel it to be so.”

-Touch the surface to ripple.

“We can travel all night.”

-Moon of the sixteenth.

“Who is outside?”

-I ask

Four characters in a thin boat.

Openness: captain at the helm, asks fundamental questions to navigate.  Control: the first-mate discovers the true nature of reflections on the glassy Sea of Chance. Beauty: always and everywhere, on and at the watch. Finally, I: the passenger remains curious about external things, but stays carefully in the center of the sampan.

The ‘process’ is a tautological expedition on which ‘I’ am both explorer and destination -- Moving over and under land and sea to discover new peoples, artifacts and structures. Sculpture, painting, video, installation, intervention, drawings -- all specimens for conjecture upon the natureculture that created them.

Past excavations reveal objects with a propensity toward visual devices of repetition and oscillating opacity/transparency; a commitment to materiality -- including components prone to rapid decay when used unconventionally (i.e. Oil on unprepared surfaces; wood structures without proper joinery); Fragmented pseudo-narratives, such as an imaginary opera with Enrique Caruso as an anthropomorphic seaweed, titled “A Thousand Shadows of Willie Watergrass,” loosely based on Pliny the Elder’s Origin of Painting; also, curiosity toward globalization, world culture(s) and the array of art history, in itself and as a precedent to contemporary practices.

When the work exists outside the intimacy of the artist’s imagination, it takes on new life engaging the public. In this context the objects become gateways for connection.

Lighthouses

Driving around the US, I took interest in roadside structures abandoned to weather and time – in transition from dwelling to ruin. What causes these architectural memento mori? Infrastructure severs access; Residential development projects file for bankruptcy; Post-conflict ambiguity keeps families from returning home (see Verosha, Cyprus). These phenomena are the residue of change, transcending boundary and epoch.

Sculptural works in my studio provided the materials to respond to these sites. Along a major north/south transit corridor I installed several lights in the interior of a crumbling farmhouse. The intervention lasted for more than an hour in the deep night and howling wind of November in the American Midwest. Hundreds of unsuspecting motorists witnessed, for only a moment, this anomaly in the high-speed landscape.

My hypothesis is that rapid change begets abandonment. I will take the raw materials/concept - Structure, Light, Transition – and experiment with the shift in context. What I’m interested in are the fundamental similarities of people existing in states of transition.