Barry Anderson: Oklahoma City Museum of Art 4.25.12 - 5.27.12

Barry Anderson: Nightrover, Junk Yard, Lawn Ornaments, and Treebeasties (1)Oklahoma City Museum of ArtApril 25–May 27, 2012Kansas City-based artist Barry Anderson presents four, short, single-channel HD video animations: Nightrover, Junk Yard, Lawn Ornaments, and Treebeasties (1). This collection of animations is quirky, humorous, and offers slightly unsettling glimpses into fantasy worlds culled from popular culture and collaged together in wackily delightful, lushly colored, non-linear vignettes. The camera offers vantage points that alternate between a birds-eye or a snails-eye perspective—from beneath tall grass, through dense forest, below big sky—that affords the onlooker a voyeuristic positioning. Anderson places the viewer within magical natural and constructed environments, each populated with Americana: vintage coquettish characters, cartoon animals, and tourist destinations. This lacing of iconic symbols of material culture at first may read as nostalgia; however, the assemblages bring forth a rich narrative that unfolds in time to reveal a sublime underbelly that works to locate the videos within a perplexing fairy tale setting— alluring and unnerving, at once.An exclusive program at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, project screen presents video art by contemporary artists working regionally, nationally, and internationally. The video series rotates monthly in the Museum’s lobby, presenting the work of 12 artists each year. The artists selected for the series present compelling aesthetic gestures, experiential visual thought, and both narrative and non-narrative explorations through their innovative investigations into an ever-evolving “new” media.ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Barry Anderson was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1969 and currently lives and works in Kansas City. He creates visual art in a wide range of media, including video animation, photography installation, and sound art, that have been presented nationally and internationally. With concentrations in photography and digital media, he received a Bachelors of Fine Art from the College of Fine Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Anderson is Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Anderson has had solo exhibitions at Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas, Texas; Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, California; ISIS Gallery, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana; Light Work Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York; Review Studios, Kansas City, Missouri; and Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri. His work has been included in many group exhibitions: The Big Reveal: Recent Acquisitions, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrueck, Germany; Emblazoned Ciphers: Artists From Kansas City, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska; Between Thee and Me, Kansas City Jewish Museum, Leawood, Kansas, and Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri; Video‘ Appart Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and City One Minutes, Expo 2010, Shanghai, China, among others. Anderson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York.