Desert Project (Or Hard On in the Desert)

About

Andy Holden's work incorporates monumental outdoor structures, plaster and bronze sculpture, film, painting, recorded music and musical performances. Often showing these diverse media together, his work builds a fragmented yet richly textured collision of ideas, references and forms. For his first exhibition at WORKS|PROJECTS Andy Holden presents a collection of works that form a mental journey of influence and a type of travel writing - an attempt to negotiate a response to a road-trip through California inspired by advice from the late Jason Rhoades to spend some time in the desert to reassess his idea of scale. In a display simultaneously reminiscent of small town American museums and the eccentric charm of the British amateur handyman, the artist presents a collection of souvenirs which attempt to question how narrative attaches itself to objects - bronze casts of plastic soft drinks lids and straws, enlarged ceramic pistachio nuts, paintings of casino carpets, gramophone records melted into bowls and decorated with abstract patterns and repeated images of Charlie Brown, plaster slices that look like the candy coloured strata of Arizona rock faces. They are a procession of propositions, fragments and clauses that attempt to negotiate influence (after beat poetry, after Hunter S. Thompson, after Ed Ruscha, after Roadrunner, after Tom Waits, after Charles M. Schulz, after Claus Oldenburg…). This ensemble of fragments, are works both conceived after the landscape and works that attempt to pre-empt the landscape. And then there is still the question of scale….