William Ashley Anderson
Region: South
I build paintings using graphics almost entirely from video games I’ve
never played. I work not from a sense of nostalgia but rather from a
late twentieth-century shape of thought, augmented by art history,
that best describes how I feel visual cognition and memory factoring
into the mechanics of understanding paintings. I sift through decades
of screenshots and sprite rips to pick out objects with potential to build
meaningful images, but my ultimate concern is the visual. I love the lightly
abstracted distillations of familiar objects, which I think of as having been
seen for me ahead of time. I make room for fresh choices by working from
collaged grayscale mockups, allowing my own color feelings to fill in and
open new ways of thinking about the imagery.