Dru Anderson - Artist

Dru Anderson, born in Oakland, CA

 

Dru Anderson’s elaborate installations of carefully rendered, lovingly detailed, and highly veristic drawings, pastels and watercolors provide visual environments of seemingly inexhaustible extension. The artist’s prodigious output (she finishes at least three works each day and often many more) is driven by a longstanding and dedicated practice of lucid dreaming. For many years now, she has been carefully documenting a series of recurring, ever-mutating dreams. While this mode of working might appear akin to surrealist experiments in automatism, the intent and effects of Anderson’s practice depart dramatically from this framework. While surrealist artists reached into the realms of slumber hoping to tap into a reality transcending that available to our conscious mind—the “sur-” in surrealism indicating a higher, surpassing level—Anderson’s works, in contrast, cast back forth from the world of dreams a universe of objects more perfect, more vivid and more auratic than the reality they come to inhabit.The elaboration in/as drawing, a medium still often associated with craft and with a heightened subjectivity, of a predominantly feminized realm of consumer objects—feathered earrings, stiletto heels, decorative objects gesturing at the domestic sphere—too easily invites the over determined language of gendered description. Fragility, delicacy, wealth of detail, ornament, excess, precision, even veristic representation: all of them have been part and parcel of this simplistic binary logic sequestering women’s art practices from Art proper. Rather than arguing for a positive revaluation of the terms associated with the feminine, which after all only amounts to implicit acceptance, feminist art historian Marsha Meskimmon suggests elaboration itself as key to overturning this binary logic. Elaboration, she notes “thought through drawing, loses track of [regulatory] time, unlaces binary stalemates, and suggests contingent forms for the articulation of sexual difference.” One might add the term not only connotes labor, the labor of working through and moving beyond, in a more classical Freudian vain it also emerges as the most radical aspect of dreamwork. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s canonical text on the relevance of dreams to our sense of self, secondary elaboration refers to a process which takes place both in the dream and after waking, in which a “process of expansion and embellishment of detail” helps manifest latent content. As such, it is the only element of the dreamwork able to reach into both dream and reality, bridging conscious and unconscious thought. Far then from a paean to the feminine, Dru Anderson’s intricate installations offer us the privilege to witness that most universal of human qualities: the meandering labors of the dreaming mind.

 

Yasmine Chtchourova-Van PeePh.D. candidate,

University of California at Berkeley.

YVP (422 w.)