All Together Now

JANELLE W. ANDERSON
SEPT 04 – OCT 03, 2021
OPENING RECEPTION: September 10 [6:30-9PM]

Janelle W. Anderson’s paintings may look familiar to gallery visitors from Longmont at the Firehouse Art Center: she requested source images from the community and received submissions from over 20 locals. Requested categories like people, landscape, and animals drew submissions of holiday gatherings, pets, and wild bears.

Anderson then spent the summer re-mixing elements of the images into paintings that form a colorful collage enveloping the full gallery space. “All Together Now” is declarative: an immediate collage drawing structure from its composite parts.

Creating paintings that cross panels of varying sizes, yet also stand alone, Anderson’s scenes unfold organically: a combination of practiced planning and intuitive connections between the elements of sourced photographs – figures, objects, colors and horizon lines blend, repeat and disappear. The resulting installation consists of recognizable pieces, suggestions of some- thing you’ve seen before or a familiar face, like the memory of dreams or flickering film stills; projections made tangible. Anderson takes full advantage of the creative control that painting provides, not with a “painterly” style but in her unique approach to the execution of a collage: buttery colors and shapes connect realistically rendered elements. In designing her solo exhibition, Anderson embraces her strengths by painting swaths of color directly on the walls to forge connections between images, further blurring the line that forms the edge of each painting.

Works in the show are priced individually, and are accompanied by a show catalog available for preorder.

Janelle W. Anderson creates paintings and drawings that relate to dreams, memory, consciousness, perception of time, existentialism, and the human condition. Using symbols, metaphors, and various design elements to create a collage-like aesthetic with representational imagery, Anderson’s work conveys a contemporary, dream-like sense of storytelling. Anderson has lived in Denver for 11 years and received a BFA in Painting from Metro State College of Denver in 2011. She has shown her work in galleries throughout the US and was a member of Pirate: Contemporary Art for 4 years.

This residency is supported in part by our partnership with NeST Studio for the Arts.
Contact Janelle W. Anderson at janellewanderson@gmail.com