Stephen James Andrews

With a mix of drawing, painting, printmaking, and animation, Toronto artist Stephen Andrews questions the role of personal memory and media imagery in contemporary self-understanding using familiar visual tropes: the Ben-Day dots of commercial printing and the digital degradation of pixilated news media, for instance. His well-known monochrome Facsimile series (1991-92) was based on faxed versions of obituary portraits of men who had died of AIDS; the drawings of The Quick and the Dead series (2004) renders media images from the Iraq war in candy-coloured pastels. Known for his dot paintings of crowds, Andrews used his signature pixilated style in The View from Here, a commission for the entryway of Toronto's brand new Trump Tower. The huge three-paneled work is comprised of 500,000 pieces of porcelain, glass, stone and gold tiles creating an image of a multicultural crowd of cheering people. Throughout the last twenty-five years, Andrews has exhibited across Canada as well as in the U.S., Brazil, France, Scotland and Japan. Extensively collected both privately and publicly, Andrews' work can be found in the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Schwarz Art Collection at the Harvard Business School.