Besides this CMOA exhibition, London-based Conceptual artist Andrew Wenrick has had solo exhibitions in London and Luzern, Switzerland. He has participated in group exhibitions in London, Bristol, Oxford, St. Andrews, Luzern, Vallauris (France), Boston, and Detroit. His work is in private collections in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, China, United Arab Emirates, Canada and the United States.
Museum hours are Friday through Sunday, noon to 4PM. The exhibition runs from May 10 to August 25. The Museum is located at 200 W. 1st Street, Claremont, CA 91711. For more information, visit here.
JS: You have a BA in Industrial Design from California State University, Humboldt and an MA in Architecture from the University of Oregon. First, what made you decide to chuck all that aside and become a conceptual artist? Second, how does your studies impact your work? Third, in light of your education, work history, artistic practice, and the various places where you have lived, how do you define Conceptual Art?
AW: As a young professional, I left the US to live in Switzerland, which presented an opportunity to focus on something other than the partner track at an architecture firm. I did not lose my passion for architecture – I worked with a very successful firm in Boston and had never made a deliberate decision to chuck it all aside. At the time I left the US, it was just a temporary pause from the architecture profession and meanwhile pursued my desire for creating art. My art pieces drew from my foundations of architecture and industrial design and to this day these strongly influence the way I think in my creative process. Then the validation came, and I have not turned back. One of the telltale signs of conceptual art is that most of the thought and ideas go into a piece before any physical making takes place. Once a strong idea has been conceived, then the making of the artwork becomes rote. And it is more than often the case that when producing the artwork, the repetitive nature in making allows for my mind to think freely and conceive future projects. Architecture follows a similar trajectory; every decision an architect makes in their design needs to have meaning and importance. Otherwise it’s just decoration. And decoration is subjective.
JS: You say that we perceive geography (viz maps) as shapes. How, then, do you account for the third dimension you introduce into your work whose material is otherwise two-dimensional maps?
AW: Reading the floor plans of a building, for example, is similar to reading maps. There is enough information on the sheet to create a visual image of the room or terrain. The spacing and curving shapes of the topographic map lines, the elevation numbers, and even the colors are all clues for one to make a visual picture from a two-dimensional drawing. All this information on a map is just begging to be used, but not too literally, to take on a new dimensional form. Since a very early age I have always manipulated objects with my hands. Making. It began with sculpting with clay and then moved onto woodworking and then into architectural model making. And it is this tactile quality that I most enjoy in working and seeing my finished work.
JS: How does ambiguity figure into perception? I’m thinking of the way in which a Mercator projection distorts the sizes of land masses the further away they are from the Equator. On a Mercator projection, for instance, Greenland appears to be the same size as Australia. In reality, that’s not even remotely true.
AW: With ambiguity, the viewer’s perceptions become varied and that makes it interesting for me. As much as possible, I try not to say or explain my intentions of an artwork because it is much more interesting to hear from someone else what they think is happening in my work. I can spend hundreds of hours on a project and with that comes a lot of thinking, so it’s refreshing when I hear opinions and reflections from a person that has only had mere minutes with my work. And then, to hear competing ideas from other viewers. These perceptions weave together into a narrative that I often would not have thought of and sometimes become a springboard of seeds for new conceptual ideas.
JS: Are the perceptual shifts your work raises in the viewer really shifts or are they just an accurate assessment of how everything is constantly shifting (tectonic and otherwise), is always in flux, socially, politically, economically, and trafically?
AW: Well, I suppose everything is actually shifting, as you suggest. Borders literally shift as well. Just take a look at maps of Europe over the last twenty or thirty years. The shifts in my work with maps aren’t meant to be so literal, though. Like a lot of my other work using nostalgic media, maps become a vehicle for people so see and re-imagine new forms and ideas from the familiar.
JS: How does your experience of the mental topology of your current residence, London, compare with that of your prior residence, Los Angeles?
AW: At the time my wife, daughter and I emigrated from Switzerland to the United Kingdom, the border agent addressed us collectively and asked, ‘where are you from?’ And we each gave a different answer in unison despite having the same upbringing! I left Los Angeles when I was eighteen, and between then and now a lot has happened to shape my existence. To compare personally London with Los Angeles …. I don’t think I can….but I can recommend being adaptable because it translates to being open minded.
PORTLAND, 2009, maps, paper and matte board, 40.5 x 55.5 cm each (16 x 22 inches each), diptych
A very minimalist interpretation of the Portand, Oregon Thomas Bros. Guide. These maps are typically laid out in square grids in order to find locations easily with the letter/number index in the back. This diptych is laid out in consecutive order convex to concave or figure and ground. The quadrant on the concave side marries up perfectly with the quadrant on the convex side. For example, when I cut out the map pieces to make the concave square I was left with all the parts to also make the convex square. Unique repetition, or individualized repetition, plays a big role in my work and this piece embodies that in a minimalist form.
EVERYTHING IN THE MIDDLE, 2012, acrylic and paper on wood, 20 x 80 x 3 cm (8 x 30.75 x 1.25 inches)
For this piece, I used a large atlas of America and as the atlas was laid out there is typically one to two pages devoted per State. And included on the pages of the States were enlarged detail city maps of the mid tier cities tucked into the corners of the unused State map pages . For example, California’s would have been San Diego, Sacramento, Bakersfield, and maybe Redding. (The large cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco would have an entire page devoted to the city map. These didn’t factor into this project).
Everything in the middle is divided into three boxes. East Coast, West Coast and everything in the middle. I cut out all of the mid tier city rings from the entire atlas as a way to get a sense of proportion of mid sized cities in America. This, in no way, reflects on the population dispersion in the States, but the difference in density of ‘city rings’ is curious and could make for competing narratives.
During the process of cutting out the ‘city rings’ they were set aside in their respective stacks, Because the paper was so thin and delicate the stacks of ‘city rings’ became very full of depth and airy and it was this quality of presentation that I then tried to replicate. In order to achieve this I developed my acrylic glue formula that could be used in a hand spray bottle, much like spraying one’s orchids on a daily basis. It was a slow process. Two or three ‘city rings’ were sprayed down and then the project was set aside to dry.
I WONDER…LOS ANGELES, 2017-18, map of Los Angeles + mixed media, 95 x 95 x 2 cm ea., diptych
Almost ten years later I found the time to get back to the Portland concept. I was very pleased with Portland and knew it would be a stepping stone to a larger scale work. This piece is also using the Thomas Bros. spiral bound guide that could have been found under the passenger seat of most vehicles during my time in LA. One possible way of thinking about this project is that the ‘city’ has been taken out of the ‘city grid’. The circle removed from the square. It is also worth mentioning that with this piece, time has softened my need for geographic rigidity. For I wonder...Los Angeles I did not feel the need to place each concave/convex square as it should literally fall on a true map of LA. Instead, they are laid out based on color.
I WONDER…MOUNTAIN IN A DESERT, 2017-18, map of Los Angeles + mixed media, 91 x 130 x 2 cm
There is a lot of coded supporting information that goes into maps and map guides like the Thomas Bros. which can be as interesting as the map itself. The inspiration behind this work was taken from the Index of Symbols. The I wonder...mountain in a desert is the symbol of a mountain.
STARS AND STRIPES, 2010 – 2013, acrylic and paper on canvas, 5.38 x 2.18 meters (17.6 x 7.15 feet), [50 x 40 cm (19.7 x 15.75 in) each, 50 canvases total]
The single most quality that helps us identify geography is shape. Take those boundaries away and an ambiguity sets in blurring relationships that allow us to ground ourselves. Take everything else away and the vastness and iconic territories are distilled only to the place names held within those borders.
This piece is about taking the context out of the 50 states in America. Each territory is giving the same size canvas and on that canvas are all the places names from that State, randomly scattered. From afar, density and color is now the gauge in identifying contextual localities. Up close, the jumble of names become familiar and repetitive.
[As one can imagine, this was a very slow process. Cutting out every single name/place from each State took a couple of years. When it came time to painting them down, I created a special box, that was the size of the canvas, where I could randomly drop the names without fear of losing any. Three or four tweezer full of names would be dropped onto the canvas and then the box would be removed and I would, without changing their location, find and flip all of the small bits that landed upside down. And then they were painted on to the canvas with the acrylic formula that I developed. Some States, Hawaii, Delaware, etc., went quickly...others like Pennsylvania, Texas and California were under the ‘drop box’ for many, many days.]
Alabama
San Bernardino
I DID...STOP AND PROCEED , 2019, acrylic and paper on wood with electrics, 32 x 8 x 2 inches
The base: Most, if not all, of the conceptual work that I do relies on some sort of medium that has strong nostalgic qualities for most of us, myself included. My use of maps and the fact that I really enjoy working with maps, if I am to stop and think about it, most likely comes from my childhood Summer holidays. Both of my parents were school teachers and had the Summers off from work. On many, many occasions we (all five of us) would all pile into our Volkswagen van and travel for weeks, and on a couple of occasions make it to the East Coast and back. But before these trips, there was always the necessary errand to our local AAA for maps! We used to come back with loads of them. They were great. Brand new, which didn’t last long because I was not the only one without the skills and patience to fold them back properly. But that wasn’t the point. The point was seeing where we were going and where we were coming from and all the places that we could go but wouldn’t.
The medium: So maps, yes. But maps on skateboards?! How did I get here? I must have been building up to this, subconsciously, and it seems a natural fit actually, although I didn’t see it coming. I used to ride a skateboard, like most kids. All through the neighborhood, to my friends houses and also around the buildings (and sometimes inside them) on the College campuses. I think my name made it onto a list that the security officers had for getting busted one too many times. I also frequented The Pipeline in Upland on occasions to browse all their cool gear in the shop. The Pipeline was the peak of my skating career. It was only once that I paid to skate in the ‘bowls’ and it was this one time that I fell and broke my arm. And that was it for me and skateboarding.
The concept: My conceptual thinking behind the I did… series touches on the real connection the CMA has in it’s home at The Depot and being right on the rail line. I suppose these days the running of locomotives are remotely automated and the duties of a train engineer have drastically changed. There was a time, though, when it was very important for the engineers to understand the language of switching and position signals that are alongside the tracks. Clear. Approach. Advanced approach. Diverging clear. Restricting. Approach diverging. Stop and proceed. These are just some of the signal codes that are relayed through the lights pattern on the switching signs. And this is what I am touching on with these works.
The lines of map networks on the boards are bits of real American city/road systems that I have cut out and stitched together to make a fictional geographic network. The piece I did…permissive block, is using ‘city blocks’ cut out from the Los Angeles Thompson Bros. spiral bound guide book to fill the empty light bulb. I did…diverging clear and I did…stop and proceed have thinly cut road networks as ‘filament’ in the light bulbs.
I DID...PERMISSIVE BLOCK , 2019, acrylic and paper on wood with electrics, 32 x 8 x 2 inches
I DID...DISPLACEMENT ZERO , 2019, acrylic and paper on wood with electrics, 32 x 8 x 2 inches
I did…displacement zero is different from the ‘position signals’ works with light bulbs. This is a tetraptych and is California centric. It’s using the two pages that make up the state of California from the large bound atlas and is the antithesis of the piece Stars and Stripes.’