“Oil and Water” Original art by Wyoming artist, Andy Robbins

The Corridor Gallery is excited to announce “Oil and Water” an upcoming guest artist show opening on May 31st at 7pm featuring the work of Wyoming artist, Andy Robbins.

My most recent work involves the development of a personal cosmology revolving around the intersection of life, death, and the presence of a complicated, and often obscured, explanation for our existence. I depict the human experience in mystical, but secular, images fraught with symbols and hidden meanings much as religious iconography seeks to make the unknowable accessible through familiar objects and gestures. By focusing on life and death, two ubiquitous human experiences, I hope to provide viewers with a starting point from which to begin exploring my paintings.

I particularly like to touch on the experience of aging and the inevitable march toward death, as so often featured in the traditional Danse Macabre (Dance of Death). I don’t view this journey as negative, but as a truth from which moments of great clarity are occasionally gleaned as the human spirit triumphs, however temporarily, over loss, suffering, and pain. Often, I portray the “meaning of life” (which I tend to think of as the “divine voice,” though in a strictly esoteric sense) as inexplicable tangles of machinery, mechanisms constructed for specific functions yet impossible for us to comprehend. Another common motif in my work, also representing the divine voice, is that of the decapitated head emitting phantasmagorical fluid, or The Frothing Head. The Frothing Head is the embodiment of the Great Mystery, a being incapable of vocalizing its own joys and miseries.

Though I am not a landscape painter, I prefer my characters to appear outdoors, where moments of epiphany take on a more cosmic scale under skies full of shifting clouds. My scenes are usually dense arrays of objects arranged in mobile-like configurations, so that no space is wasted and all elements are balanced. This, for me, is a way of organizing the complexity of our world into narratives that make sense, much as words are strung together to form coherent sentences.

Though my still lifes of dead grasshoppers may appear dissimilar from my more detailed paintings at first glance, they in fact share similar themes. Fragile in life, saintlike in death, these insects are presented not as perfect, intact organisms, but as unique individuals damaged by the hardship of existence. They have already completed the cycle of life and death, though whether they have reaped any wisdom along the way remains an enigma. The human characters of my larger pieces, and indeed the viewers of the paintings themselves, tread a parallel path. -Andy Robbins

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The Corridor Gallery is a fine art gallery located in downtown Casper Wyoming featuring the work of 6 member artists and one resident artist. Works of the member body are on display during business hours or by appointment with the exception of guest shows. Guest artist openings and shows will be promoted independently and will be a great opportunity to view new artist’s work from around the world.