Andrew Norman Wilson

Master of Fine Arts, Sculpture
Edward Ryerson Fellowship Recipient

Bio

Education: 
BS, Syracuse University, School of Public Communication 
Master of Fine Arts (MFA), SAIC

Awards: 
Dedalus Foundation MFA fellowship 
Edward Ryerson Fellowship

Exhibitions and Presentations: 
De Young Museum 
The Banff Center 
University of California, Los Angeles 
University of California, San Diego 
The Academy of Fine Arts Finland 
The Sullivan Galleries at SAIC 
threewalls gallery 
video_dumbo 
The Abandon Normal Devices festival 
Extra Extra Gallery 
Other Cinema

Experience at SAIC

I have a Bachelor of Science (BS) in journalism and communications that trained me in the fields of affective imagery, authentic falsification, and psychic property ownership. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) exposed me to more nuanced forms of humor and social critique that combine and proliferate with research, social interaction, experimentation, and perceptual play. Through coursework with faculty whom I was aware of prior to enrollment, I learned new ways of journalistically representing social structures and my position(s) in relation to them, and also diffracting these relations through artistic processes and mediums. And the school’s interdisciplinary approach to art making and scholarship allowed me to take part in a heterogeneous community actively engaged in working through social and political matters of concern.

Personal Statement

My current practice focuses on globalization and its emergent forms and flows of labor, capital, and information. In creating my interdisciplinary work, I draw from my immersions in varied forms of corporate control to become an actor within the network and generate surplus materials from my interactions.

By combining oppressive economic, social, and political forms and patterns, I create new moiré patterns for desire and knowledge to flow through and explode, opening them to a conceivably infinite array of forces. This leads to deeply heterogeneous forms and flows of cultural production, wherein culture, and life in general, can be understood as a living, involuted and expansive process rather than an entry on a spreadsheet.

Upcoming projects include the creation of a fully functional ecovillage for 100 live guinea pigs, a mousepad business, a PowerPoint tour, and a potential lawsuit from the Google Corporation.

Current Interests

Artistic quality for me is not in the isolated form, but in the consciously creative approach to social arrangements both real and imagined. My work starts with research and investigation geared toward exposing conflict and its conditions. This opens up an impure laboratory of ideas and strategies with which I want to ask: what are the active and effective notions of “the common” today, amid increasing physical and virtual migration, the information revolution, and the consequent transformations of the modes of production?