Bio
Andrea Myers, born 1979 in Kettering OH, USA, explores the space between two and three dimensionality, hybridizing painting, sculpture and fiber arts. She received her BFA in Printmedia in 2002 and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies in 2006 both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hyde Park Art Center, Evanston Art Center, Toledo Museum of Art, Art Prize, Art Miami, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Fiber Arts International, the Columbus Museum of Art, and coGalleries (Berlin, Germany). Current exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibition, Neon Speed, at the Textil und Rennsport Museum, Hohenstein-Ernstthal, Germany and Pieced+Painted, a two-person exhibition with Galen Cheney at the Haggerty Gallery, University of Dallas. She has participated in residencies at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, MI, A Studio in the Woods, a program of Tulane University in New Orleans, Fortress Man Textile Symposium in Daugavpils, Latvia, the Textile Art Center in New York City, the Studios at MassMoCA and in 2018 traveled to Dresden, Germany for two months as part of the Greater Columbus Arts Council artist exchange program. Recent publications include TimeOut Chicago, the Boston Globe, New American Paintings, the Columbus Dispatch, and Cut Me Up Magazine issue 5.
Andrea was one of five 2011 Efroymson Fellowship recipients, receiving $20,000, and has also been awarded artist’s grants from the City of Chicago, the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. She has work in the collections of Chase Bank, Capital One, Dayton Metro Libraries and Facebook offices in Chicago. She is represented by Hammond Harkins Gallery in Columbus, OH, GUT Gallery in Dallas, TX, McCormick Gallery in Chicago, IL and Galerie Klaus Braun in Stuttgart, Germany.
Artist Statement
Within my artistic practice, I explore the space between two- dimensionality and three- dimensionality, hybridizing painting, printmaking, sculpture and textiles. I am engaged in the physical and material processes of constructing pieces and my work is driven by contrasts in materiality, form and scale. My current mode of making involves explorations in collage and the accumulation of layers, utilizing accessible materials, such as paper, fabric and wood. Through simple materials, I build pieces that transcend their materiality and take on new meanings. By layering and collaging two- dimensional materials, I build dimensionality and form, while referencing compositional techniques of painting and printmaking. There is a push and pull embedded in the abstracted forms, experimenting with both additive and subtractive processes. Color is a crucial component to my work, looking to fabric as one might look to tubes of paint, layering acrid colored materials together in close proximity, to assemble pieces that draw the eye into moments of concentrated, intensified color.
An undercurrent in my constructions is the relationship between objects and the architectural space, typically a gallery space with white walls and neutral floor space. I imagine my pieces as interventions to the space, pulling the viewer’s eye to eruptions of color on the wall, floor and the moments in between. At times, my sculptural works convey a feeling of a physical painting in dimensional space, as if the viewer is immersed within the boundaries of the flat picture plane.
In my ongoing textile works, I create machine sewn fabric collages from a wide range of fabrics, exploring and manipulating ideas of quilting, applique and tactile formations, patch worked and growing across the surfaces of walls. Through repetition of machine sewing and lines of fabric, the soft geometry that arises presents an interplay between painting and textile arts while also growing into undulating, dimensional forms.