Garnished Parable of the Field | Andy Messerschmidt

Within the former Pillsbury Flour Mill, Andy Messerschmidt maps earthly inventions, particularly through the colonial and hedonistic interferences that toil with the archaic and contemporary – celestial echoes of rituals, industries, and eclectic histories caught in perpetual exchange. His main oeuvre gathering together the detritus of human culture, albeit sardonically, likening them to totems and sitcoms, sacred sites and parades, oil spills and incense, imbricating them, but into a constellation of sorts; myth and media, ruin and ritual, sacred and pop-culture profane, pointing towards contradictory directions, yet bound by the same gravitational pull of confliction.

Andy Messerschmidt (1976, Illinois/USA) currently lives and works in Ely, Minnesota.  He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2002 and earned his BFA from Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois in 1999.  Andy has shown extensively in New York at Plane-Space Gallery for seven years and continues to have shows in the United States and abroad. Recently, he has exhibited in Germany, Japan, Hawaii, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.  His ongoing Agroccult series is a body of over 1000 landscape paintings depicting geomancy (land divination) and metaphoric stimulation of the Earth’s nervous system through acupressure applied by humans.