Studies for Siding: Randall Anderson

November 15 – December 28, 2014

Using an auto-ethnographic approach to personal history as a window on the world, my new work explores marginal contexts, like storage facilities, highways, trailer parks, and transitional visual information, as in, the information that you may pass on a street but not openly acknowledge. Earlier in my career, I made performances on street corners, in shopping malls, and public squares in various parts of the world. In part, this work addressed the commodification process and hinged on a Marxist critique based on the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. I grew up in trailer parks where my first homes had wheels under them and my father was a long haul trucker. From those experiences I learned that an inherent movement of things and people informs my understanding of contemporary life, and I find potential in the visual information that is understated, ubiquitous, and often unacknowledged as a carrier of meaning. I’m interested in wresting meaning out of poor and decrepit materials, things not considered, yet very present. I have worked with, for example, public bulletin boards, treating them as a form of spontaneous collage. Materially I’m working with the idea of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Mining meaning where it appears that there is none.