Andrew Testa: A Constellation of Sorts
to
Martha Street Studio 11 Martha St, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1A2
Andrew Testa, "To be left / By one’s side, (#4)" 2015/16
photopolymer gravure chine-collé, 14" x 17"
Opening Reception: Friday February 22nd, 5-8 pm
artist will be in attendance
Artist talk: Saturday, February 23rd, 3 pm
ASL interpretation available by request
These events are free and open to the public
Martha Street Studio is pleased to present A Constellation of Sorts, a solo exhibition of work by Andrew Testa (NL). A Constellation of Sorts will be on display at Martha Street Studio from Friday February 22nd to Friday March 29th. An opening reception will be held on February 22nd from 5-8 pm with the artist in attendance. Testa will present an artist talk on Saturday February 23rd at 3pm.
A Constellation of Sorts is an assemblage of found and family photographs within Testa's personal collection, to be shared and hidden, discontinuous yet whole. Testa is both artist and archivist in his explorations, collecting these now-muted objects where he does not attempt to bring clarity and sharpness to the photographs he encounters, but rather embraces the softening the image may have experienced due to the heaviness of elapsed time. He revisits an image over and over, again and again: scanned, cropped, printed, cut, moved, folded, unfolded—a process that distances his printed image from the connecting photograph.
Peering into the collections of Testa's gridded and orderly displays, a slow unfolding begins to emerge. From afar, the entirety of the artworks—a constellation of sorts—are assumed to be completed and straightforwardly simplistic in their initial encounter. When one pauses and allows their eyes to wander, moments of inconsistencies arise. Gaps and voids begin surfacing…slowly: a blank image is noticed, a void in a grid, a fold, a line. The systems, initially assumed to be complete, become interrupted and begin to drift into fragility.
Artist Statement:
My art practice is an exploration of slowness. It is concerned with the experiences of one’s perception of an outside world. It is an entangled and embodied knowing—an attempted awareness of the space between where an outside (what one can see, hear, touch, smell, taste) meets one’s inside (how one sees, hears, touches, smells, tastes). My practice is a question of translation and an attempt to understand the slippages within such acts and gestures of transformation—an inquiry into the spaces between object (whether thing, space, place), perception, word, image, and the experiences these meetings entail.
In my practice, my prints, drawings, books, words, and sounds are an attempt at familiarity, or my recognized inherent unfamiliarity, of the spaces and places my body is temporarily invited to be upon. Through gestures of slowness I hope to become acquainted and courteous with my surroundings. I begin my works by translating my encounters, attempting to create two-way conversations with the non-human things I experience in my daily rituals of walking, pausing, looking, and listening. I think of my practice as a study with things opposed to a study of things: a collaboration between the non-human and myself that is interested in not only the individuality of something but its ecology—how that something can speak, exist, and influence the community of things it is a part of.
Through walking, collecting, storytelling, documenting, folding and arranging, my images reframe and represent fragments of objects into assembled entities, evoking narratives of an object’s past and its collector’s present. Through a negotiation between arbitrary and systematic gestures, I investigate both subjective and objective observations rooted in the slippery connection between knowledge, word, and image, while searching stories and memories existing within the gridded assemblages I make.
Andrew Testa is an artist, collector, writer and educator whose practice is a question of translation and an attempt to understand the slippages within such acts and gestures of transformation—an inquiry into the spaces between object (whether thing, space, place), perception, word, image, and the experiences these meetings entail. Testa is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in printmaking at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and has additionally taught at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie. He achieved his MFA from York University in Toronto and is the recipient of a SSHRC scholarship and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant.