ANDREW NASH
Artist Statement

Excerpt from the catalog: 
"Andrew Nash
10 years - a survey
2001-2010" 

Written by Jess Frost

In discussing his most recent body of work, Andrew Nash paraphrases from Jasper Johns' sketch book: "Take an object.  Do something to it.  Do something else to it."  These paintings, like the work in his show This That and the Other Thing, are based on figurative drawings, but the result is poles apart.  "I'll do drawings and keep pushing those drawings and manipulating them until what was pretty clear in the beginning has been changed... until it becomes an altogether different thing". Nash has given one of these works the title Third Mind, 2010.  Third Mind is a book by the artist and poet Brion Gysin and beat legend William S. Burroughs.  It is a collection of writings in which the two employed a device referred to as "Cut-ups".  This process, combining random pieces of writing cut and pasted together to form a surreal narrative, is very much aligned with Nash's recent body of work.  His sketches are tweaked and skewed and then, almost like the glyphs in his early abstractions, they hit the canvas, where once more they are scraped away and resurfaced, until they become that "altogether different thing."  A face or a chair becomes an elegant line or dash of color that somehow still speaks about the form from where it began.  And then all these things, or the remnants of them, are woven together, as if this was where they were born.