[catalogue text for solo exhibition at Charles Nodrum Gallery, 06-29 August 2009]

Analogue Shift




Engaging random occurrences has had an important role in the history of artistic challenge. Chance has powered experimentation, but also served to negate artistic agency and aesthetic intent, suggesting the immanence rather than transcendence of art. A mix of these interests endures in Justin Andrews’s use of the arbitrary and random. In his current work, he uses chance processes to generate a sequence of compositional alternatives for non-objective paintings, the emphasis on process reflecting the diverse systems and structures that pervade everyday life. This process begins with an open rectangular box in which Andrews shakes various small pieces of metal, plastic and wood, remnants of his sculptures. The resulting arrangements are photographed using a digital camera, providing the basis for a sequence of abstract paintings. The photographs become works in their own right, recognising that the digital has its own reality. On other occasions, the offcuts are poured from the shaker box onto a canvas and glued into place, the canvas having already been painted with image of previous arrangements introducing an exchange between the actual and representational.

In as much as Andrews’s production process entails a certain course of action leading to a predetermined conclusion, the shaker works involve intent, but the principal effect is to disconnect composition from the need for deliberative aesthetic decisions. Indeed, like many reductive artists Andrews does not see the limits of a process as limitations; rather they enable the broad possibilities available within the boundaries of a specific set of circumstances. In the case of the paintings, the mediating role of the digital—in standing between the actual and the painted—is an additional distancing effect of an epistemological nature, challenging the assumption that reception in abstract art provides immediate and universal access to meaning. Similarly, although the formal variations produced by each shaking of the materials in the box mark a moment in time the paintings document a situation that no longer exists.

The role of commonplace materials and temporality in Andrews’s shaker works reflects his growing interest in bringing abstraction ‘closer to the living world of real events and recognisable objects’.ⁱ The intricate, accidental compositions of his paintings evoke the complex, open systems underpinning the urban. Andrews began the present series of works in late 2008 during a residency in Tokyo. He experienced Tokyo as a free-floating state of potentiality, paralleling his own investigations into the convergence and reconfiguration of colour, form, material and process in time. Where the abstract is often seen as an autonomous aesthetic realm, Andrews’s current works are an index to heterogeneous urban spatialities beyond the limits of the picture plane such as those he encountered in Tokyo. In exploring intersecting and juxtaposed forms and materials, he represents urban environments as disorderly, unbounded and unquantifiable, in being, as Bill Hillier argues, ‘large physical objects animated and driven by human behaviour.’ⁱⁱ




Carolyn Barnes
Melbourne, 2009

Dr Carolyn Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, where she is involved in a range of research projects investigating the role of art and design in public communication.

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i Justin Andrews, e-mail statement to author, May 3, 2009.
ii Bill Hillier (2005). ‘Between Social Physics and Phenomenology: explorations towards an urban synthesis?,
n: Fifth Space Syntax Symposium, Delft, The Netherlands, p. 3.
Available at http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/1679/1/hillier05-socialphysics.pdf. Accessed 7 August 2008.