PRESENTATION: Kathryn Andrews

Kathryn Andrews’s work is based on sources from mass media culture and art history, which investigate the modes of appeal and attraction elicited by the real mythologies of both Hollywood cinema and political campaigns. Her installations have included circus tents and carnival attractions, which invite viewers to interact with her works, giving rise to playful engagements that reveal the powerful magnetism that everyday imagery and objects hold over.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: DePaul Art Museum

Approaching artmaking as a philosophical enterprise as much as a material practice, Kathryn Andrews disrupts staid systems of meaning-making by inviting viewers to join in an active interrogation of the anxieties, fears, and desires that inform the act of looking. To this end, Andrews’s multidisciplinary output—which includes sculpture, installation, performance, and print—mines repositories of cultural objects and images already alive in mass consciousness, both for their rich auratic power and for what they reveal of our collective values. By marshaling a panoply of subjects across media, from vaudevillian performers to film actors to serial killers to cartoon characters, Andrews floods the referential field, disturbing the viewer’s need to identify locatable subjects in order to produce meaning. At the same time, her aesthetically varied output and excessive semiotic play ridicules the dominant narrative that artworks and their logics are produced by a sole author. Histories of violence, collective imaginaries, art historical referents and materials chosen for their connotative value are strategically deployed in idiosyncratic combinations that invite alternative, open-ended readings. By peeling back the hidden drives that underlie perception, Andrews’s singular provocations turn a critical eye on the ways we elect, whether consciously or unconsciously, to limit our encounters with the symbolic and material world at large—and ask what proliferous new experiences might come from more unbridled modes of attention. In anticipation of the upcoming 2024 presidential election, Kathryn Andrews’s work “Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway [ . . . ]” (2020– ) addresses the gender disparity among US presidents and is on presentation on BAMPFA’s Outdoor Screen. Chronicling nearly 150 years of women vying for the presidential seat, Andrews’s work serves as an active record of the persistent and systemic sexism in American politics and a call for the urgent need for change. Animated for the first time for BAMPFA’s presentation, the video begins with Victoria Woodhull in 1872, women have graced the nation’s potential presidential stages in primaries and general elections long before they could vote. These trailblazers include Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress; Patsy Mink, the author of the nation’s Title IX civil rights law, protecting people from discrimination based on their sex; and Gloria La Riva, the 2020 presidential nominee for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who was also the first Latinx woman to run for president in 1992. Foregrounded in Andrews’s installation, the long list of historic women’s names are contrasted with the highly recognizable faces of the men who have won, ranging from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama. Chronicling the nearly 150 years of women vying for the presidential seat, Kathryn Andrews’s work spotlights the persistent sexism in American politics and the urgent need for change. The project will be displayed publicly in election years until a woman becomes president of the United States. Depending on this year’s election results, the project will close the day after the first woman becomes president of the United States or a month later, on December 6, 2024, to signal the ongoing gender gap. Another version of this project is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Photo: Kathryn Andrews, Victoria Woodhull, Belva Ann Lockwood, Abigail Scott Duniway [ . . . ], 2020– ongoing , Site-specific installation for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)- Berkeley, Courtesy the artist and BAMPFA

Info: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), 2155 Center Street Berkeley, CA, USA, 1/10-6/11/2024, Days & Hours: Daily 24 hours, https://bampfa.org/  & Institute of Contemporary Art, 1717 East 7th Street, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 7/9-19/11/2024, Days & Hours: Daily 24 hours, www.theicala.org/