The Open Door Gallery Presents Kimball Anderson - Inside/Outside
July 29 - November 8 2013, Reception October 3 2013, 4 - 7 pm
Posted Sunday July 28 2013 at 9:11 pm.
Used tags: art, boston, gallery, vsa
The Open Door Gallery presents an exhibit which explores the separation of self and environment. Kimball Anderson is an artist whose experiences of chronic fatigue syndrome and agoraphobia inform the art he creates, manifesting in themes of isolation, recursion of self, inaction, and first person experience. The artwork explores the quiet and the gentle, while searching for something ambiguous underneath and reflects the period when the artist began to overcome agoraphobia and enter the world.
Kimball Anderson - Inside/Outside. July 29 - November 8, 2013.
Reception: October 3, 2013, 4pm to 7pm.
Featured during the reception is a theatrical presentation of Kimball's abstract comic "I Don't Get It" at 6 pm. The piece explores ambiguities around identity and interpersonal relationships.
Artist's Statement
I make art that seeks for a sort of peacefulness. A quiet that can't be separated from anxious avoidance, but doesn't have the inner tumult that anxiety would suggest. It is all relative to comfort. Pushing out from comfort, pulling back into comfort.
I have agoraphobia, and the experience of it is very much about comfort and safety. When I am outside and among people there is a need for something stable, something that will help me be able to cope. I look at trees, look at the complexity of their branches, and the patterns in their bark. In a way, focusing on trees often in my art is a way to express some of my experience of the outdoors. When I draw them I tame the hecticness around them. I make something comfortable out in the world. But not by denying the nature of it, not by pretending that it is at peace. But by justifying peace and unease together.
I also draw myself. In those I am perhaps drawing the piece of the indoor environment I feel least comfortable with. Not so much because of the imperfections of my body, but because of it's blurry connection to my identity. I draw parts of my body and they are just parts of a body I see. I draw my face and it's just there, on the paper. Not that it isn't me, but it becomes less me. There is a strange comfort in that. Like what is seen by others is just some other self. And that the self that scrapes against every interpersonal interaction, and through the world, that is just the artist creating the picture. The nature of both selves are there in the piece, neither are denied. They are justified together.
It is this creation of peace that has within it an unease that drives me to create. It is an act of acceptance.
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