With their Miami Beach colors and almost-animated veneers, Andy Mister’s drawings that incorporate appropriated images are beautiful to look at. You want to be in the scenes that Mister depicts — though that would mean, in the protest images, avoiding tear gas, authorities’ bullets, and the threat of arrest and violence in cities like Beirut, Gaza, and Minneapolis. Mister juxtaposes those images with scenes of nature at its best: Mount Everest, Joshua Tree, and Virginia Beach. Mister is apparently making a connection with these nature images to politics, climate change, and environmental degradation, and their motifs are similar to the protest works: Clouds from nature instead of clouds from tear gas; and shimmering colors that parse the images into distinct sections. It’s as if Mister was applying a weird X-ray vision to each scene — showing us what’s inside each image, and not just what’s on the surface.
Jonathan Curiel
