Contact Sheet 153:
Barry Anderson

Description

This exhibition catalogue features Intermissions, an innovative art exhibition and series of related programs highlighting the video and photographic art of Kansas City artist Barry Anderson. In a time of economic uncertainty and other societal stresses, this project provides viewers a welcome artistic interruption to daily life. Anderson’s work, and the entire project, is designed to bring art into the community. Intermissions reminds people of the importance of remembering to stop and enjoy the moment.

Anderson’s colorful video pieces include abstract patterns, nature scenes, and semi-nostalgic images from decade-old advertising. Each piece creates a good-natured, introspective scene that contrasts the busy settings where the work is shown. Anderson’s work addresses our cultural need to escape the onslaught of media input through isolated fantasy worlds. By slowing or re-interpreting space and time, he strives to identify the existence of introspective spaces within the everyday, proposing that we don’t need to retreat but to re-envision and re-think what is already around us. Light Work’s project places video art and photographs at multiple venues across Syracuse, making it accessible to the general community and creating many opportunities for meaningful interaction with the work. Not only does this exhibition catalogue include Anderson’s images, it also offers information about the scope of the project.

This level of collaboration surrounding Intermissions represents an exciting step for the arts in Syracuse and brought a common thread to all the spaces involved during the exhibition period. Embracing the concept of art intervention, the exhibition expands beyond Light Work’s main gallery to many venues in town, thereby creating dozens of points for interaction, both indoors and outdoors, and allowing the entire community to become engaged with the work.

The following partners participated in this unique collaboration with the Light Work gallery spaces: the Everson Museum of Art, multiple venues at Syracuse University, SUArt Galleries, Syracuse Symposium, The Warehouse, the Urban Video Project, Community Folk Art Center, the Orange TV Network, the Red House Arts Center and more. Exhibition sites also include public spaces such as billboards and multiple video projections onto buildings in downtown Syracuse.

This catalogue includes essays by Peter Frank and Emily Vey Duke.

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Anderson’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the country, as well as in Thailand, South America, Russia, and the UK. Recent exhibition venues include the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS; Milo Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; White Flag Projects in St. Louis, MO; Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, TX; Salina Art Center in Salina, KS; Schopf Gallery on Lake in Chicago, IL; Dam Stuhltrager in Brooklyn, NY; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, Canada. Anderson currently lives in Kansas City. He participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2006. Anderson was born in Greenville, TX. He holds an MFA from Indiana University Bloomington and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin.

www.barryanderson.com