My student Norma Garcia writing about Alice Andreini’s MFA Painting & Drawing thesis exhibition No-Man’s Land, in the School of Art’s Gatov Gallery East on 19 April 2017.
Exhibition Information
Artist: Alice Andreini
Exhibition: No-Man’s Land
Media: oil on canvas
Gallery: Gatov Gallery East
Website: andreiniart.com
About the Artist
Alice Andreini is a Drawing & Painting graduate student at CSULB’s School of Art. This exhibition is her MFA thesis exhibition. She is originally from Minnesota but found herself in San Diego a while back and then in Long Beach for school. She always had an interest in art while growing up, but was too scared to pursue it as a career since it was not very practical. For her undergraduate degree she went with medicine, but then switched to theater arts when she realized she needed to pursue at least some type of art. When she is not working on her paintings in the studio she enjoys reading poetry and philosophy in her free time. After she receives her MFA she hopes to continue to paint and become a college professor.
Formal Analysis
Walking into Andreini’s exhibition I immediately noticed five very large and colorful canvases. And one canvas that was small and black and white. The paintings were detailed to the extreme. They contained several colors and layers of paint that gave them a sort of 3D effect. They also contained several geometric lines and shapes that gave the paintings an illusion of a virtual grid. It was obvious that these were landscapes of golf courses but with a bit of abstraction and surrealism. Golf courses are known for being very nature filled and picturesque. However, Andreini challenges this notion with her paintings by creating a new way to experience nature.
Content Analysis
Andreini claims that the way her landscapes are framed reveals the ideologies of a culture. In America, there is a frame for nature where it is presented as an uncontaminated “truth” even though it has already been appropriated as a body of symbols. According to Andreini, nature is regarded as a “pure” form but it’s innocence has been spoiled and used to profit through expansions of territories. In her paintings she reveals the constructs and seductions of the landscapes. The golf courses represent the allure of the American pastoral but she works them into a net of spatial and ideological constructs that are unveiled to create a new realm where perceptions are disrupted. This is her new way of experiencing the world.
Synthesis/ My Experience
It is weird to think of nature as being something technological, when technology is anything but natural. At a first glance, I did not realize Andreini’s paintings were nature landscapes because they don’t resemble anything natural. But then, the poles with the little flags gave the golf courses away. It is interesting how she created a landscape while making it look like a movie animators draft. With her paintings, I believe that Andreini succeeded in uncovering the machine under nature and converting it into a virtual reality.
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