Today we’d like to introduce you to Andrew Anello.
Andrew, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I grew up in Canton, MA, just south of Boston. I did my undergraduate work at Eugene Lang College (BA gender studies, 2003) and Parsons School of Design (BFA Photography, 2003) in New York City. After graduating, I stayed in New York, worked in the art world, and exhibited in group shows at Dam Stuhltrager Gallery in Brooklyn and Sarah Meltzer Gallery in NYC. In 2009, my partner and I moved back to MA to purchase a loft with studio space in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I completed my MFA in Photography at Bard College in 2012. In the past several years I have exhibited work at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA, and Gallery Ehva in Provincetown, MA, and most recently, at the New Bedford Art Museum. For the past 3 or 4 years, I have been hosting Lunar Teeth, a performance art forum that meets quarterly on the equinoxes and solstices and is open to the public (loonarteeth.tumblr.com).
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
Here’s the most recent artists statement I included with my show at the New Bedford Art Museum:
I am interested in the problem of narrativity in photography. The medium simultaneously presents and suppresses information, hinting at a larger story and denying it in the same breath.
There is blank white space on the wall between each print. There is a seam between the thing and the word for that thing. That seam is photography.
“By meditating too tightly on a work’s subject one cannot penetrate beyond the subject to the psyche that gives meaning to it.” Mark Wyse, Too Drunk to Fuck (On the Anxiety of Photography)
Photography is a hideout.
Here’s a more in-depth statement about the main piece of work I included in that show called “90 Worms from My Father’s Garden,” which you can see at www.andyanello.com:
I unearthed the worms represented in “90 Worms from My Father’s Garden” from a twelvesquare-
foot patch of grass that my father had decided to annex into the ever-expanding garden that is the focus of his retirement years. The process of preparing the soil involves running it through a screen to sift out the rocks and other debris. Along with unwanted detritus, worms also get caught on the mesh grid. The 90 photographs that make up the piece represent all of the worms that were stranded on the screen over the two days it took me to convert that patch of grass to garden.
I carried this project out as a conceptual exercise. That is, I had an idea and I enacted that idea according to a predetermined set of instructions I gave to myself:
1. I would photograph every worm that was caught on the screen.
2. Each worm would be photographed in the same way: on a white seamless using a studio view camera and black and white film.
3. I would make no effort to “pose” the worms, but rather, would place them in the center of the paper and let them compose themselves while I worked with the camera and took the picture.
4. The worms would be returned to the freshly screened soil after photographing.
The results surprised me. The worms had arranged themselves into a set of symbols that seemed both completely random, yet highly specific. The weird collection of marks they formed in the printed photos allowed me to think about and explore the ways in which photography creates meaning. Photographs have a complicated relationship with signification. They are an indexical representation of what happened at a specific time and in a specific place, yet they are also, always, an abstraction. For instance:
“Are those worms on the wall?”
“No, they are photographs of worms.”
This creates a confusing relationship where a photograph is both a thing unto itself (for example: a print on paper), but also an abstraction, once removed, from the person, place, or thing it pictures. The subject matter of 90 Worms can be said to be worms. That much is true. That some of the worms arranged themselves into shapes resembling letters from the Latin alphabet, both underlines the commonality of abstraction that exists between language and photography, but also hints at another more personal subject matter.
Finding an actual, English word in the worms was an escape hatch from the weight of the conceptual burden I had imposed on myself. In order to make the word “Sister” legible to the viewer, I had to manipulate the orientation and size of the worms in the enlarger, thereby violating the conceptual rules I had set out for myself. The route I took from worm to word went something like this: the photograph is a sign signifying a worm; the worm is a sign signifying a letter; the letter is a sign signifying a sound; the sounds combined form a word, which signifies a relationship: Sister. We are now a full four steps removed from the patch of dirt in my father’s garden where we started. The patch of dirt is where I found Sister, although my actual sister is sitting in an entirely different patch of dirt in a pot in my parents’ kitchen.
The other half of my practice right now is focused on organizing, and occasionally performing in, Lunar Teeth, a quarterly performance art forum that started and host in New Bedford, MA.
In your view, what is the biggest issue artists have to deal with?
Capitalism, Fascism. and Unchecked individualism.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
People can show up to Lunar Teeth events. www.loonarteeth.tumblr.com and search for Lunar Teeth on Facebook.
Contact Info:
- Address: Lunar Teeth
Co-Creative Center, downtown New Bedford - Website: www.loonarteeth.tumblr.com, www.andyanello.com
- Facebook: #lunarteeth
Image Credit:
The images from the gallery (house head, and blanket monster) are by Casey Atkins.
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