Andy Mister: Solemn Anthems

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Beacon NY based artist Andy Mister. Titled Solemn Anthems, from the Baudelaire poem 'Landscapes,' the show pairs drawings of recent social and political uprisings with mountain and seascapes; connecting and overlapping physical, ideological and environmental terrain.

Mister’s drawings investigate the boundary between mechanical and manual reproduction. Working with images appropriated from contemporary and vintage photographs, Mister questions how meaning is created or lost through the act of ‘copying’. Drawn freehand, works are rendered through blends of carbon pencil and charcoal over acrylic-washed paper to visually replicate the soft finish of newsprint.

A suite of six works on view are a response to an article Mister read in the April 2020 Jacobin Magazine documenting that significant mass demonstrations took place in 114 countries during 2019. Selecting photojournalism visuals of protests throughout that year in Barcelona, La Paz, Gaza, Beirut and Paris, Mister later extended the timeline to include a May 2020 uprising in Minneapolis. The group was featured in the exhibition Twenty Twenty, curated by Richard Klein, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield CT, just prior to this presentation.

In juxtaposition to the protest works is a series of landscape drawings investigating man’s relationship to nature and how that relationship has been mediated through popular imagery. Interested in how the natural world has become politicized, particularly in relation to contested issues such as climate change and environmental protection, Mister highlights Mount Everest circa 1950 and Virginia Beach pre-Hurricane Sandy devastation in 2012 as well as fauna from the Joshua Tree desert and a selection of other florals.

Cropping, shifting orientation and sometimes inverting his source material, Mister’s intent is not a direct translation of the original. While the subject matter in Mister’s drawings is apparent, his interpretation allows for a wider manipulation of the meaning and effect from the translated composition, opening space for greater ambiguity and furthering his development of content and representation vs. meaning and interpretation.