As much as pieces of you are pieces of me is about bivalves, it is also about much more––it is a work of what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” a story of entanglement of life, its precarity and beauty.[2] Unlike Andison’s previous solo show an accumulated life (2019) which dealt with grief and the grieving process, pieces of you is about survival. It is a hopeful look at resistance to destruction, and Andison’s use of oysters and mussels as the conceptual backbone is more than fitting. pieces of you certainly offers many aspects of the artist’s recognizable conceptual tropes––emphasis on text, her poetic take on feminist theory, word play, focus on ideological structure of language and the way it constructs patriarchal discourses, analysis of seduction and beauty of language, etc. However, the precarity and vulnerability I detect in Andison’s handling of both the material and the theme is where I see some interesting new lines of departure in this new body of work.

Exhibition on from June 15th - July 20th.