YOU
ARE HERE — Joseph
Woodard, Art Critic, Los Angeles Times
"Some art spaces are inspiring enough to affect the
evolution of art they eventually host. Count the large, luminous gallery
at the Brand Library in Glendale as one
of them. And count this exhibition from painter Dean Andrews as one of those
acutely site-specific artistic events.
Andrews developed her series of paintings, subtly layered and graduated works
that suggest skyscapes, with the knowledge of the impending exhibition. A symbiotic
relationship between art and walls is part of the ultimate, meditative charm.
She calls the show “You Are Here,” and her 15 uniformly scaled, 68-inch-square
paintings go under the title “Presence,” a clear indication of her
intent to celebrate this particular space.
As much an installation piece as a showing of individual works, the artist’s
serial canvases make for a dramatic sight, in ways that seem both minimalist
and monumental, with an effect both bracing and soothing.
The canvases, hung at precise intervals around the gallery, are stapled to the
wall. They are denied frames, which tend to set up hierarchical separations between
art and art space.
Although leaning toward soft shades of blue, green, gray and rose, Andrews’ art
is deceptively calm and limited of palette. In face, delicate layers of color
and flowing brushwork give the paintings personality, while adhering to a fairly
strict, post-minimalist aesthetic. Yet Andrews' brand of painting has a warm,
objective lyricism instead of the cold, calculating snap of some minimalism.
If the end result of the exhibition is a kind of transcendental appreciation
of the effects of light and color in a given, generous space, it is also a celebration
of the purely physical aspect of a gallery — this gallery.
These paintings are illusory in that they evoke neatly framed expanses of sky
or sea or pure painterly expression and exploration, but in the end, remain as
paintings.
There’s nothing virtual about it. There lies part of the subtle power."
You Are Here
Installation View
