Andy Messerschmidt

Region: Midwest

Website: http://www.andymesserschmidt.com

City / State: Ely, MN

Divining by Ephemera (Shoddy Stagecraft)

My work mimics the psychosis surrounding crystallomancy and the performance of fortunetelling in the gypsy wagon. Like divining by crystal balls, my artwork deals with staring hard into ephemeral stuff. The cursory and fragmented subjects in my work come and go in the viewer’s eye, much like the fading imagery that reveals itself, then disappears, to the scryer of crystals.

My methodology/ideology is at all times “designed detritus.” I hew base and useless ephemera into compacted, streamlined compositions in the manner of the straining swirl of a black hole or singularity theory. As in a junkyard trash compactor, everything is accepted unconditionally and pressed together. Similar to the yarns and bewildering accoutrements in the crystallomancer’s stagecraft, the layering of these decorative patterns and images has been built up to a point of inevitable charlatanesque collapse.

These are shrines to ornamental ephemera. These are scopophilic dragnets.