Artist Statement
Paintings, sculptures, both static and kinetic, video, process work, and installation, photography, drawing and note taking are all culturally generative acts. I take part in all of these forms in hopes of providing a comprehensive swathe of sense fulfillments, a fair reflection of society itself. I don't seek to reflect diversity in terms of race or gender or age or affiliation as much as I seek to create metaphors for diversity by creating art objects that serve as surrogates or stand ins for the entities that are in relationship with one another out there in the world.
Inside the screen, this shield, my body, I experience togetherness and isolation. I am together with society as a whole, apart from it through distinctions of culture and separated from the whole as an individual. I, as an artist, make light of this uncomfortable situation of relationship by creating fantasy worlds. Realizing the gravity of relationship dynamics which lead to choices in art, the coupling of lovers, the creation of families, gangs and nations, and the engineering of machinery, I attempt to have a visual conversation about relationships that is beautiful, profound or tragic or both. Art for me is play within the context of this seriousness.
A major preoccupation in my work is the way we as human beings, animals, are mediated by our own technology and products. The love/hate dynamic that exists between the human world and the industrial/technological world, and humankind's secret longing to couple with machines irrevocably are all subjects that inform my particular brand of fantasy semiology which is signified in my work as geometric abstraction and biomorphic abstraction, sometimes combined together, or combined with other visual elements. The gray area in this dichotomy is where productive systems and processes are created.
At times, contemporary infrastructure and the humans that inhabit it seems to be a function that leads us away from any sense of selfness in the world. At other times we notice the herculean achievements of this grand partnership between the human being and the constructed world and we learn how to achieve great things by using these systems. On the one hand, I am interesting in lamenting our addiction and dependency on the artificial world we've built around us... and on the other hand I seek to celebrate this human/technological collaboration by employing systems to generate socially significant art projects and objects.
Andy Cline
May, 2008
