Artist Statement:
I am frequently mistaken for a happy person. Understandable - I'm usually smiling around people. But I've got a mind that is, like many others', at odds with my well-being. I learned early on to hide this from view, and maybe as a result, my art practice is the process of better understanding, savoring, or dismantling things that are hidden. I'm rooted in the universality of sensation, and continually return to animation as a practice of understanding what it means to be on this planet: that the horrifying, confusing, beautiful collection of disparate things in the world form a singular, vibrating whole.
My art usually explores things that are rendered invisible due to their immateriality, proximity, distance, or assumed normalcy: phenomena, like sound; the body’s sensations and emotions; the invisibility of others' trauma that privilege affords; the brain’s inaccuracy of memory; the often ambiguous connection of nature and technology; the forces behind a camera that influence a subject; the vastness of cells; the cycles of generational trauma and mental illness; the ubiquity of a background; the easily missed breaths between words. With these artworks, I want people to observe their own acts of perception, and experience themselves as a felt phenomenon, connected in ways often overlooked.
Bio:Gwyneth Anderson is a depressed animist, descended from European invaders and immigrants, based in Chicago. She makes time for the animation, absurdity, patterns, and paradox of humans and not-humans, often focusing on sensations and systems that are invisible to us due to their immateriality, proximity, or assumed normalcy. She's presented work in galleries, festivals, forests, and empty lots throughout the Northern Hemisphere, including with Roots & Culture, Roman Susan, Woman Made Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, and 6018 NORTH in Chicago; the Freies Museum in Berlin; and @ptt in Geneva. As an artist in residence, she's gestated at the Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), FRISE (Germany), Harold Arts (Ohio), Arteles Creative Center (Finland), and Utopiana (Switzerland). She teaches photography to teenagers at the Lutz Center for After School Matters, and has taught in many other institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency, and Johns Hopkins University's Baltimore Youth Film Arts. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received her certificate from the Center for Deep Listening in 2018. She thinks artist bios and CVs are deceptive in nature.
Various kinds of press and online presence:OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Gwyneth Anderson, OtherPeoplesPixels Blog, December 2014
The Art of Measurement: Qualiascope by Gwyneth Anderson, Written in Thread, December 2014
Laughing Video recommendation, Chicago Magazine, November 2011
Laughing Video still, TimeOut Chicago, November 2011
Artist talk at the Pori Art Museum, minutes 43:05 - 53:07, October 2011
Artist biography, Arteles Catalog, October 2011
Interview with Music for Installations, October 2011
TimeOut Chicago review of Pretty, Smart, Poetic, February 2011