Andrew Connors is an artist and designer in New Haven, CT.

1. a complete account of the system

Medieval writers told tales of gems with lyrical powers not because they were naive but because they perceived within lithic density the force of a world not fully theirs.
—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Anarky

In the sun-shot bedroom on a silent afternoon, the furnishings stand in place and stare through one another like sleepwalkers. Each has an image-like presence: something considered and presented but also mum and withdrawn. Like a photograph cut from the flow of time, each gives access to (while dissembling from) the world it represents: its coming into being. In the way that boredom can appear as “grief” on the face in a photographic portrait, we aren’t really sure what we are looking at. Reason and scrutiny only get us so far in our attempts to understand the image. 

I am fascinated by the dense, conglomerate, node-like and uncertain qualities of these objects. Designed objects appear first as (often mundane) bundles of qualia: white, plasticine, humming, that assimilate a set of technological features: electric, multi-speed, efficient, and portray a range of cultural meanings: safe, soothing, powerful, all of which constitute what I call the object’s “presence,” and which are embedded in (but not essential to) the object’s use: a pedestal fan that moves air within the silent room. Through my work, I intervene in the “presence” of objects, reworking these features apart from – and often at cross purposes with – the object’s use. Through playful intervention, I seek to give a viewer the ability to interrogate form and maybe even the presence of implicit ideologies by disrupting the convention once and thereby (hopefully) making it visible everywhere.

I see my work as a response to conventional thinking about form in the field of graphic design: historically, designers have invested in the systematization of form, a project that shifts the theorizing of form away from the material and interpretive and toward the idealized and unified. However, the word “form” itself already contains enough slippage to unsettle this practice, carrying within it various senses of form as “aesthetic,” as “type,” as well as form as the bare act of intervening upon materials. In my own work, I design around my notion of the object as something with “presence” (as I described it earlier) and perhaps imagistic intrigue, something that will have a volume, mass and density, a world line, a set of material features. I develop formal features in my work – its surface as well as its construction – around this notion of materiality rather than in spite of it. 

This approach allows me to work back into the typology of form. Whether I am making a book, poster, website, spatial intervention or a sculptural object that assimilates a range of forms, I begin by trying to untangle the broad set of connections that an object holds, and thereby entangle myself in the object, its visual rhymes and adjacent types, and maybe even its history. My ideation practice is associative: often part diagram, part text, part collage, all of which form the basis for seeing an object in a new way. I use a range of methods that have been called by various names across different cultural periods, including “ostranenie” or “defamiliarization,” “surrealism,” “assisted readymade” and so on, and while an art historian may want to wrangle with my premise that these various practices are fungible, each nevertheless centers around objects as often under-examined phenomena. Each also represents a desire to use the oneiric logic of form to make something hidden visible and to make something recognized and assimilated less so: to erode the edges of the formal category.

Flower Balcony (one-to-one), 2022
wood, burnt applique flower ornaments
11' x 4'6"

Pool, 2022
projector, turntable, vinyl record, video
dimensions variable

Screen, 2022
cut acrylic, box fan
24" x 24"

Gemini Engine, 2023
pedestal fans, cycle timers, wind chimes,particle board, saw horses, thesis book
6' x 8' x 24"