Opening Reception: April 19, 6 – 8 pm

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of abstract works by Scott Andresen: Marked and Mended.  This exhibition is the New Orleans based artist’s first solo exhibition with Octavia Art Gallery.

Marked and Mended is an exhibition of collage and mixed media artworks exploring the theme of repair.  Andresen uses a variety of material processes where each piece goes through the separate stages of construction, deconstruction and reparation.  Through the methodical act of repair, the artist seeks to create wholeness.  

The process of repair is both a fundamental component of the human condition and a deeply personal theme in the artist’s life. In the summer of 2010, a major life event occurred when Andresen was bicycling and was struck by a car, suffering a host of traumas that threatened his health and mobility. During rehabilitation process, he began studying the history of repair, focusing on the various ways domestic objects have been mended over the years, and using it as a source of inspiration. His current work is inspired by a Japanese form of ceramic repair in which the cracks of broken objects are dusted with gold and silver to highlight, rather than conceal the break. While renovating his house in New Orleans, Andresen started collecting spent pieces of sandpaper, each a small abstract composition of marks and tears. He began repairing each piece by mounting and patching the torn areas with gold or silver leaf. Sandpaper is a normally inconsequential material with a short life span, in Andresen’s hands each short life wears the marks of its own history, and collectively the repaired objects become something much greater as a whole. 

Scott Andresen received his MFA from Yale University and his BFA from Hunter College. He has exhibited in over 50 group and solo exhibitions including the Jack Tilton Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Exit Art, Naples Museum of Art and The Bronx Museum. He has attended residencies at Socrates Sculpture Park and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, while also receiving grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Jacob Javits Fellowship. He has works in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design (NY). Andresen is an Assistant Professor at the LSU School of Art where he oversees the Foundations program.