In/Dwellings

Artist Talk - Monday, January 27, 2025 - 6-7:30pm

About the Exhibition

This exhibition features a selection of artworks made by Professor Jonathan Anderson over the course of nearly a decade, 2005 to 2014. Drawn from three different series, these works all begin from the premise that representational paintings are like built structures, setting up provisional spaces for negotiating our ways of dwelling in the world. In many of his paintings, Anderson purposefully conflates the construction of an image with the (re)construction of a building, a chapel, a home. But the curious thing about painted images is that they generate all such spaces in entirely flat surfaces. And this creates important tensions inherent to all representational paintings: they simultaneously open onto things-in-the-world other than themselves, while persistently remaining their own distinct things-in-the-world (a flat painted surface hanging on a flat painted wall). The painted image is thus both open and closed, offering access and withholding it; and it is the materiality of the paint itself that performs both functions.

In this exhibition, Anderson actively increases these tensions, often causing the flat ground of each painting to stand forth as a figural object within the painting. Ultimately, this exhibition is an extended meditation on what George Steiner called the “covenant between word and object, the presumption that being is, to a workable degree, ‘sayable.’”