Stephen Andrews . Cartoon

Opening Reception Friday 30 November 2007, 7pm

What appears as a distant explosion or flashes of light we quickly recognize as a car beetling across a desert to drive directly over us, exposing its underbelly and machinery. Cartoon (2007), a 45 second looped animation by Stephen Andrews, quotes a car commercial deemed too violent for broadcast, and war imagery seen daily in the media. This work alludes to the 'safe' relationship of violence in both media and children's animation as it concludes with a deer being hit and run over. The car becomes emblematic of what is being fought for in the Middle East—oil—and the desire to maintain our consumerist culture and the 'freedom' it allows.

Since 2002, Andrews has been taking images of the Iraq war from the Internet and hand-rendering them in crayon drawings rubbed over a window-screen on mylar. This technique imitates the CYMK dot-matrix of a newspaper image. For this exhibition, 380 cell drawings hang closely together; the repeated patterns capture each and every slight movement defining its own process before they are reconstituted into an animation.

This series marks a departure from Andrews' earlier works addressing the loss of the individual in the crowd in hoi polloi (1999), or Facsimile (1990–3), evocative renderings of newspaper obituaries of people who died of AIDS. The direct interaction with the body politic is now shifted to the politics of media representation, and the use of one image as a distilled symbol for an entire event.

Stephen Andrews (b. 1956, Sarnia, Ontario) lives in Toronto. He is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, and Platform Gallery, Seattle. This is Andrews' first solo exhibition at The Power Plant. Cartoon is curated by Swapna Tamhane, Assistant Curator.

Stephen Andrews
Cartoon