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- "Paper Study 44"
An exhibition of works on paper might sound limited, but John Anderson's solo show at Mad River Valley Arts in Waitsfield is anything but. In fact, "What's the Big Idea?" reveals an imagination that is wondrously unfettered — in discovering both what can be done with paper and what the mind can call forth on it.
Take Anderson's "Paper Studies" (2006-2012), an eye-catching black-and-white series in graphite. The artist works by exploring an idea iteratively within self-imposed parameters; in this series, each piece uses only two sheets of 15-by-11-inch paper, one of which must remain flat. Graphite can be applied in any way.
The 10 variations on display illustrate wildly different ways to fold, cut or crumple paper and apply graphite. They include a black bulge punctured with tiny holes mounted on a white page; a rolled piece anchored to the flat piece, both of which are diagonally striped; and a twisted white ribbon cut to reveal black paper beneath it. And these are only a fraction of the 150-odd works in the series.
"There really is no end to it; ideas and concepts can just keep coming," Anderson said by phone from his home in Warren.
Ditto for his ability to conjure unreal worlds with depth, dimensionality and perspective in meticulously hand-drawn renderings. His "Exo-objects" series (2021), on 26-by-28-inch paper, depicts minimalist forms in dry pigment and color pencil in strange relation to their ebony pencil grounds — as if they coexist "in a foreign gravity," as Anderson writes in the series label. The 19-by-24-inch acrylic paintings of "Linescapes," his latest series from 2023, create perspectival spaces solely with lines.
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"This show doesn't represent anything that we know, anything that's familiar to us," said Sam Talbot-Kelly, executive director of Mad River Valley Arts and curator of the exhibition, during a visit. "I'm out into wonderland [with] how he uses shape, color, line."
Anderson's facility with hand drawing is no surprise: The 81-year-old was an architect for 40 years. (He also made art throughout that interval.) After earning a master's at Yale University in 1968, long before the existence of computer-aided design, he landed in Burlington by accident: After a van breakdown, a friend invited him to stay.
He founded John Anderson Studio in the Queen City in 1973 and later took on such inventive local projects as the Wing Building at Main Street Landing — on a 30-by-300-foot slice of land — and the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory at ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, whose stepped colored bricks represent the Champlain Thrust Vault.
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"What's the Big Idea?" is Anderson's first solo exhibition since his 2012 show at the BCA Center in Burlington, which marked his transition to art making as a primary pursuit. (In 2004, he had won a BCA commission to paint the SkyGate Murals, the four single-color, themed skylight cones at the Burlington airport.) The current exhibition samples all the "big ideas" the artist has explored since then, from quantum mechanics to science fiction to astronomy. The show's title comes from his undergraduate days at Williams College, when a history teacher gave him a D- on an otherwise competent paper because it had no "big idea."
Sometimes Anderson's overarching concept appears to be the 3D potential of paper itself. Like "Paper Studies," the "Cosmic Rope Constructions" series (2016-2019) is akin to paper sculptures. On 24-by-18-inch pages, Anderson layered printed photographs of nautical rope tangled in seaweed that he took on Cape Cod — he's also a photographer — with swirls and nests of paper ribbons that he painted, punctured or printed with microscopic text. These pop off the page like "models for imaginary cosmic events" such as exploding stars, the artist writes in his series label.
"I think of paper as an object, which is why I don't want to frame anything," Anderson said, explaining the pins that hold each piece to the wall. Hence, too, his aversion to overstepping the paper's boundaries: Nearly every work is neatly centered within the material's rectangular format.
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Other series' big ideas aren't obvious. In one 18-by-24-inch work in the "Unbuilt Projects" series (2023), a thicket of vertical rods spears a group of opaque cubes inside four floating, transparent walls. Plenty of architects' projects never get built, but this one is unbuildable. It's a futuristic building suggesting some indeterminate human activity and made from materials that don't yet exist, Anderson said.
"When you go to work right now," he explained, "you go into public spaces where there are lots of cubicles. That is reflective of the capitalist engine. I wanted [the series] to show bizarre, impossible buildings that would suggest a whole different way to think about government, business, politics."
Anderson said his approach to art making resembles his approach to architecture.
"The concept is critical. It doesn't have to be real. If your concept is a building orbiting the Earth and crashing into it" — which is how one of his private home commissions began — "it opens up a conversation. The further out you go in the beginning, the bigger chance you have of ending up with something that's innovative."
He added: "I think everything in life could be that way."