We all live inside inherited forms and spaces. Most seem permanent until they don't.

I'm interested in the moment something familiar no longer feels inevitable, like watching a container deform in real time. My work moves through identity, whiteness, and the circumstances that deform and reform our sense of self.

Entry Point

I found my entry point into art-making in 1999 as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I was studying performance, video, and new media with artist and mentor  Kip Fulbeck., who had a challenge for his students that has stayed with me ever since: “Tell me something non-transferable—tell me something that is uniquely yours.”

For me, that was albinism. I had always known I was different, but I had never explored that difference earnestly. What was albinism exactly? Who else had it? What did people see when they looked at me? And what had it taught me about how I saw myself?

By the time I graduated in 2001, those questions had become the beginning of a personal narrative about the strange racial position albinism created for me: it defined me unmistakably as white while simultaneously making me feel other.

Most of my work then was experimental, time-based video. Spoken word became especially important because I wasn't a poet or performer. It pushed me somewhere vulnerable. In Green Slip (2001), I returned to the moment when I first realized I was white and, more specifically, to how albinism had made my whiteness visible to me.

I was looking closely at artists who used identity, the body, performance, and representation to complicate how we understand ourselves and one another: David Hammons, Felix Gonzales-Torres, James Luna, Coco Fusco, Linda Montano, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Matthew Barney, Paul Pfieffer, Saul Williams, and Tehching Hseih. 

Widening the Aperture

In 2003, I moved to Chicago to attend the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My advisors included Barbara DeGenevieve and Claire Pentecost, both of whom pushed me to think harder about what the work was actually asking.

I remember one meeting with Barbara on a particularly personally dark day. And as I cried to her about the hole I was in, she blurted out, “Yes, Kris! That's the real fear. Now you're getting somewhere!”

She was right.

SAIC widened my aperture. Joseph Grigley me about visual storytelling. Tiffany Holmes taught me how to test and build concepts over time. I practiced creative writing with Rosellen Brown. Gregg Bordowitz showed me how artistic ideas could be framed, particularly when the boundaries between art-making, politics, and activism became unstable.

My work expanded into sculpture and photography, but the more important shift was conceptual. The personal narrative of albinism opened into a broader questioning of white racial identity. I had become more race-conscious. I was beginning to see myself in explicitly racial terms: I was white, and I was a person with albinism. The tension between those two experiences gave me an unusual position from which to examine whiteness.

The questions became bigger. How had albinism changed my understanding of race? Where was I complicit in personal and institutional systems of white racism? What was racial ideology doing to my mind, my imagination, and my behavior as an artist?

And as a white artist looking closely at Black artists who were already working through the complexity of racial identity, what was that encounter doing to my own imagination and the objects I was making? Race is, among many other things, a visual construction. As a visual artist, I became increasingly interested in what I was adding to that construction, its critique, and the conversation around it.

Time and Spirit

At SAIC, I also became interested in artists and philosophers thinking about time. I was reading Deleuze, Bergson, Kubler, Serres, and Masumi. Their ideas about becoming, movement, sequence, rapprochement, and intensity gave me another way into questions of identity.

Adding time to race opened something up for me. Identity no longer had to be treated as fixed. It could move. It could accumulate. It could become something else.

In We've Got to Fight the Powers That Be (2005), I repurposed two working fondue fountains, replaced the chocolate with sunscreen, and housed them in custom-fabricated metal containers. Installed side by side on the wall, they resembled utilitarian drinking fountains, endlessly circulating white sunscreen.

The work was sensory and oddly inviting. The gallery smelled like tropical lotion and hummed with motors. Some visitors even put their fingers into the fountains to catch sunscreen.

I was interested in fragility and innocence as qualities associated with whiteness. Sunscreen carried nostalgia, childhood, protection, vulnerability, race, and the body all at once. The absurdity and playfulness of the fountains gave those meanings room to collide without resolving them. That piece contains a lot of what I was learning about my practice.

I wanted to make objects with feeling—personal, playful, sometimes funny, but capable of stirring something more difficult underneath. I thought of that space as spirit: the place where our feelings about ourselves reside.

I found myself returning to artists who worked there in very different ways: William Pope L., Robert Gober, Laurel Nakadate, Nick Cave, Sun Ra, Lee Bontecou, Glenn Ligon, Kieth Edmier, Duane Hanson, Rudolf Stingel, Urs Fischer, Vija Celmins, Clifford Still, Catherine Yass, and Douglas Gordon. 

New York

In 2005, I moved from Chicago to New York, where I continue to live and work. I was fortunate to make the move alongside an extraordinary group of friends and artists: Rashid Johnson, Sheree Hovsepian, Stephanie Powell, Robert Davis, Angel Otero, Vincent Dermody, Jamisen Ogg, Heidi Norton, and Natasha Gornik.

I also met Supervert early and fortuitously in New York. And through Rashid, became close friends with Alex Ernst, Hank Willis Thomas, and Joel Mesler. In one way or another, all of these people have shaped my practice. I'm grateful for their friendships, jokes, examples, encouragement, and guidance.

My studio is in Bushwick, where I've worked on and off for many years. Art-making for me has always happened in fits and starts. But the questions have remained remarkably persistent.

Clay and Memory

In 2015, I started working with red self-hardening clay and fell in love with the material. At first I was making large, flat tablets. I would put a 20-pound block of wet clay onto a 6-by-6-foot sheet of canvas and use my hands, forearms, and body weight to press it into a thin surface. I cut shapes from it, carved into it, and then left it alone to harden.

That's when something unexpected started happening. The clay moved. As it dried, it curled, pinched, shrank, tightened, and cracked. The finished objects became distorted recollections of their original forms.

I started thinking about memory and the distance between a lived experience and our recollection of it. Joseph Grigely once gave me a phrase I've carried with me: “Remembering is a difficult thing to do, but someone has to do it.”

Clay seemed to understand this intuitively. Wet clay exposed to air and human touch moves quickly from malleable to fragile. It remembers pressure. It records touch. And as it hardens, it deforms around the history of what happened to it.

The clay also left a beautiful pink residue on the canvas underneath it. Eventually I stopped seeing those canvases simply as work surfaces and started drawing directly onto them with clay.

I pinned canvas to the wall and used my hands and studio tools to smooth, swipe, press, scrape, massage, and carve the clay into the surface. I sometimes felt less like a draftsman or sculptor than a masseuse. That physical intimacy became essential to the emotional quality of the work.

Shape of Time

By 2016, these ideas came together in a body of work called Shape of Time. I was thinking about what it meant to be a person of my particular time, and more specifically, what it meant to be white in my time.

Around then, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote: “White people are, in some profound way, trapped.” It had taken generations to make people white, he argued, and would take generations to unmake them. That idea resonated deeply with me.

I had spent years becoming conscious of myself as white. Now I was wondering what it might mean to become something else. “Becoming” had already entered my thinking through Deleuze, but it began to take on greater personal and political meaning. If whiteness was something historically constructed rather than natural or inevitable, then perhaps it could also deform. Perhaps it could be unmade, remade, or transformed.

The political environment surrounding the 2016 election made those questions feel increasingly urgent. White resentment, nostalgia, and nationalism were becoming newly visible in American public life. At the same time, more white Americans were beginning to participate (often awkwardly and belatedly) in conversations about race that people of color had been carrying for generations. My work increasingly occupied that tension.

Becoming

Over time, I've come to think of my practice as an attempt to stay with moments when seemingly stable things begin to change.

Identity. Whiteness. Memory. History. The self.

I'm interested in movement and mass, in what we inherit and what we carry, and in the ways experience deforms and reforms us over time. Clay continues to matter to me for exactly this reason. I can press it, stretch it, smooth it, damage it, and try to control it, but eventually the material begins to behave according to forces of its own. It dries. It remembers. It changes shape.

For a long time I described the subject of my practice as epiphany. I was interested in those discoveries that suddenly make another way of becoming possible. I still am. But I've become equally interested in what happens afterward: how difficult it can be for a person, an identity, or an inherited structure to actually change its shape.

Toni Morrison once described the characters in her novels as winners because, whatever ultimately happened to them, they learned something critical. Their experiences were epiphanies. They came to know something they hadn't known before. I've always loved that. I aspire to be like one of Morrison's characters. When I drop dead, I hope I've managed to become something other than what I am today.

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Connect online:
@krisandrews.ig

Visit the studio:
6 stanwix st brooklyn

Send me an email:
kris.andrews@gmail.com