Andre Petterson | Balance
Andre Petterson | Balance
October 19 - November 2, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 19, 2019, 2-4 PM
Balance, Vancouver-based artist Andre Petterson's latest exhibition, is a reflective exploration of the precarious tensions and constant flux at play within the built environment of his surrounding urban landscape, which the artist has observed and bore witness to since his arrival from Saskatoon in 1970.
Central to this series is a body of monolithic found objects: cranes, high-rises, mountains of sulphur, the sculptural qualities of which hearken to the artist’s multidisciplinary practice. This subject matter becomes mediated by Petterson's mixed media methodology, the collage and photo-manipulation elements of which echo similar processes of deconstruction, assemblage and enhancement reiterated in real estate advertising imagery, the physical transformation of the built environment, and in the composite character of the city itself.
In contrast to Petterson's visual metonymies for industry and development, the negatives spaces of his compositions and the figures that disrupt them enact a forceful allegory of our fraught environs. The presence of these stand-ins reinforce the open-ended nature of Petterson's work, allowing for it to be read in myriad ways. As these figures face away from the viewer, they recall the aesthetic lineage of our recent past and beckon the viewer to bear witness to the precarious balance of the present moment.