Studio Visit & Interview with Andrew Catanese
By Jes Distad
I first became familiar with Andrew Catanese's work at the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta. At first sight, I could tell they contained multitudes. My studio was just down the hall from theirs, but their work was so impressive that I was painfully shy and would just peek my head in to look at it when they weren’t looking. I don’t think I ever said more than two words to them during that time, and I regret that, because talking to Andrew is like a little tutorial in Zen Buddhism. For as impressive as their portfolio is, they are also patient, generous, and incredibly well spoken about art, biology, human nature, and more. Flash forward a few years later after our shared time at Goat Farm, Andrew started their MFA at Stanford University, and I accepted a job in San Francisco. I’m less shy now. Andrew’s work keeps getting more impressive. But I digress— this isn’t a story about us. This is a story about Andrew Catanese.
You can tell Andrew’s work from a mile away. Their work is vibrant and meticulous. There is cohesion, room for play, and so much nature. Andrew’s graduate work is a little more fluid, but then again so are they. They somehow managed to stay grounded and keep their Southern charm and humility while navigating a cross country move during a pandemic while also competing in ultra marathons, attending graduate school, and showing work. That’s just the level of discipline with which they live their life, and is reflected in well-thought out paintings, zines, sculptures, performance pieces, and more. A true multidisciplinary artist.
While visiting their studio, a coyote walked into the yard and approached the window. The whole scene reminded me a bit of one of their paintings: a bit magical and unexpected. I appreciate the vulnerability some of their newer work takes on and feels a bit transformative to those that knew them before moving to the Bay Area.
Andrew is graduating this year, and I for one and very excited to see what comes next for them. You can keep up with them on their instagram or see more of their work on their website.
Interview
Hi Andrew! Thanks for showing me around your space and talking to me about your art. For those that don't know you, can you tell us a little about who you are and what type of art you're making these days?
I am an artist from the American South. I mostly make paintings, but also frequently work in sculpture, printmaking, and bookmaking. Recently, I also did a performance piece at Liminal Space SF. My art practice focuses on hybridities between the human and non-human and how that impacts our relationships with the non-human, our identities, and relationships to each other.
How does the Bay Area's art scene compare to the South for you?
It's a bit difficult to compare the two because I moved during the pandemic and have been in grad school at Stanford since arriving. I have a wonderful community here at the university with my cohort, the faculty, and students, but have only just started to get to engage more broadly with the Bay Area's scene in the last year or so. I certainly miss Atlanta and the wonderful art community there. I always appreciated that strong activism was a part of Atlanta's art scene. Artists were always present at protests and often took leading roles in those movements locally. Atlanta also had an incredibly welcoming art scene. I arrived knowing absolutely no one and was able to quickly feel a part of everything happening there.
In addition to being a multidisciplinary artist, you are also an athlete. How would you say your athletics have informed your art or vice versa?
When I was younger, I often saw my running and art as counter to each other and wanted to keep them separate. As my relationship to athletics has changed, so has the way I see it relating to my art practice. I realized at some point they have always been intertwined, the body and its ability to transform and change is central to my practice (and worldview). Running and cycling are ways of feeling present in my body in a way where I don't feel I have to perform a gender identity. The feeling of transcending these pressures has always been a part of the draw for me emotionally, but has also become a more literal escape that allows me to get far into wilderness spaces where ideas of gender simply don't mean anything. I often see them primarily as a means of getting into spaces that are not dominated by human presence, where the hybridities I mentioned before, between human and non-human, can thrive.
You have studied art for quite some time. Who are some of your mentors and inspirations?
Lately, I have been on a bit of a Sam Gilliam kick. His paintings have inspired how I'm approaching the first layers of my paintings, however my work becomes more representational in the top layers. I've also been really fortunate to get to work with Paula Wilson and Jamie Adams in undergrad, both of who have continued to shape my practice, even though I no longer work directly with them. In graduate school, I have worked most closely with Gail Wight and Terry Berlier at Stanford, both of whom have played a big role in how I approach my work conceptually. Enrique Chagoya and Xiaoze Xie have also provided a lot of medium specific guidance to me while I've been at Stanford.
Can you talk a little bit about the subject of your work shifting from mythology and leaning more heavily into hybrid bodies?
In the five years before graduate school, my work tended to involve a lot of direct adaptation of ancient Greek and Christian narratives into my work. I grew up in a non-religious family with my Dad reading Greek mythology to us in a very conservative part of the South. So both sets of stories had long been familiar to me, and both also have a rich history in Western art. I was adapting and combining multiple narratives and placing them in Southern settings to play with the notions of morality present in the stories. As often happens in painting, I was not fully in touch with my own motivations while working on the paintings. Eventually I realized I was drawn to human-animal hybrids and stories of transformation, which I have come to understand as metaphors in my work for gender and queerness. These elements have become more central in my work, while narrative has taken on a secondary role. Interestingly, the paintings are still frequently read by viewers as depicting fables. The prominence of animal and hybrid characters draws a close tie to how we think of fables and many other moralistic stories. So while the emphasis has shifted, I have been surprised that the contents of my practice remains relatively stable.
Follow up to that, I could talk about biology and nature with you all day, and I like what you said about amphibians breaking all the "rules." Can you expand on your thoughts on non-performative gender in nature and how that translates into your art?
A lot of what I do begins from animals I encounter and feel some connection to in those moments. When I start painting or drawing these subjects I tend to focus on these ideas of connection, which run counter to western ideas about "Nature." These ideas have deep roots in Europe going back to the ancient Greeks emphasizing our separation from wild places. The desire to categorize and separate nature has long driven a lot of the West's approach to landscapes. Its consequences are evident in everything from how we try to address climate change to how we structure our National Park System; all of these emphasize a sort of purity of category, whether it is separating humans from non-humans, species, native versus invasive, or even just drawing boundaries around parks or private property. In all these, there is an inherent idea of human as separate from the rest of the world and that we have the ability to control or coerce nature to our whims. Breaking these rules of category is something all animals do, but amphibians provide many clear and potent examples. One of my favorite instances of this is a species of mole salamander native to the Midwest. The species is entirely female, but does not reproduce asexually. They use sperm packets from other nearby salamander species to fertilize their eggs, using some of the DNA from these species while remaining genetically distinct and entirely female. This allows them to break a number of rules of category that science insists on including the function and necessity of certain sexual morphology, separation of species, and the way genetics and sexual reproduction functions. Amphibians provide a host of other interesting morphology from their transformative life cycles to being able to change sexual morphology in some cases.
You recently did a performance art piece at Liminal Space in SF. Had you done performance art previously? Can you tell us a little bit more about what inspired that piece?
The performance at Liminal Space was the first time I have done any kind of performance art. It was a painting performance that I came up with after having spent 19 days in December running on Black Mountain, one of the major mountains on the Bay's Peninsula. It also grew out of a class I was teaching at the time on alternative processes in painting where I was lecturing about the Japanese Gutai movement and Action painting and the connections those movements have to performance art and paintings. I wanted to create a work that could speak to my connection to the mountain and the experience of spending so much time there, as well as my own motivations for movement and exercise. For me the work ended up being about my gender, being bipolar, and, most importantly, the feeling of communicating with the landscape through my movement and immersion in that space. This last idea is probably the most easy to understand. The performance involved me repeatedly climbing up and over a ladder, while holding a loaded paintbrush. At various points I use other painting instruments including brooms, rakes, my hands, and squeegees. At the end of the performance I remove all of the paints, the ladder, and the painting implements and what is left is the image of a mountain. The approximately hour-long performance speaks too a connection with landscape, and to ideas of timescales for mountains versus people and animals. We can engage with a place our whole life, feel a deep connection with it and even feel that we understand a place, but on the grand scales of time for the earth, it's the blink of an eye. In the end, the mountain will be what remains.
Once you finish your MFA program this year, you mentioned you want to teach. What is it about teaching that leaves you with more energy when you start?
A big part of why I wanted to attend Stanford was the opportunity it provided to teach. Unlike many MFA programs, we get to TA every quarter and starting our second year we get to design and teach a class of our choosing. Because of the pandemic, I ended up getting to solo-teach three courses while at Stanford, one on writing public art proposals, one called "Drawing Outdoors," and another on alternative processes in painting. While I thought I would enjoy teaching, I underestimated how exciting it actually is for me. Getting to help students grow as artists and seeing them progress and create brilliant ideas of their own is incredibly invigorating. When teaching my own classes, I found I often left the end of class with more energy than I started with and more excited to pursue my own work. I think it is the combination of helping students and seeing their various creative approaches that I find so attractive in teaching.
A lot of your work including your murals used horror vacui. How did you land on that style?
The work I was doing before graduate school tended towards this style of dense, patterned, illustration-like depictions of my subjects. It had grown out of my interest in Northern renaissance artists like Bosch and Breugel, illustrated manuscripts and scrolls from around the world, and from the lush, crowded forests in the American South. I have since moved away from this style because I felt that it locked the work too tightly to a narrative reading and kept some of the conversations I was interested in having about hybridity and connection to landscape from happening.
Where can we see some of your work in the coming months?
I will also have my thesis exhibition in May, I will do another iteration of the painting performance from Liminal Space on May 16th and the opening reception will be May 18th. At this point, I haven't started planning beyond that in order to remain focused on producing the work for my written thesis and thesis exhibition.
Lastly, anything else you want us to know?
I don't think so? I feel like we've covered quite a lot
