Stephen Andrews Take Hold

Take Hold is a concise 25-year survey of work by Toronto-based artist Stephen Andrews. The exhibition explores photographic sources for the artist’s work in drawing, painting, printmaking, and video, and considers how the generations of remove from the “original” as an idea, captured in a photograph, is further shaped in other media.

Says Andrews, “the various ‘looks’ of mechanical reproduction, be they digital, the dot matrix in photographic reproduction, or film or television technologies, are rendered by hand in an attempt to represent both the message and the means by which it is delivered. Picturing these filters articulates the distance from which we view the world. […] In some of my own photos that I have used as source material for paintings or drawings, I have sometimes found something missing, whether it is lighting or something off compositionally and the images exist only as paintings or drawings. As with all my rules, though, they get broken from time to time. I now find it interesting that the meanings of a particular image can take on different associations depending on the medium it is rendered in, be it photographic or paint.”