Salina Art Center

Artist at Work:  Barry Anderson press release

Artist at Work:  Barry Anderson
Thursday, March 26, 2009
5:30 – 6:30 pm
at the Salina Art Center

Salina, Kansas - In conjunction with his current Salina Art Center exhibition, Kansas City artist Barry Anderson will present an Artist at Work program at the Salina Art Center, 242 S. Santa Fe, on Thursday, March 26, from 5:30 – 6:30 pm. This event is FREE and open to the public.

Through the Artist at Work program, the Salina Art Center promotes discussions among Kansas artists that engage professional visiting artists with their artistic peers. The Art Center has designed this program in response to addressing our artists’ desire for more professional interaction and development, and to gather and grow as an arts community. In his Artist at Work presentation Barry Anderson will discuss his experiences and development as an artist as well as the nature of new media art and its place in the art world.

Barry Anderson:  Always Becoming Something
on view in the Salina Art Center galleries through May 3, 2009

Diverse Salina residents populate Barry Anderson’s newest work, Always Becoming Something, an ongoing video project that explores various communities through video portraits. Volunteer subjects for this video artwork interacted one at a time with the artist on camera, standing in front of a green “chroma key” screen. The artist then brought them together within a digitally created space of his imagination. The “typically minimal environment focuses viewers’ attention on the negative spaces between individuals highlighting the desire to, and often inability to, connect with each other…not only a portrait of the individuals but of the community in which they exist.”

Other versions of the video were created during a residency at Light Work in Syracuse, NY, and involved art and drama students at Syracuse University. The project will continue on to involve gallery patrons in Oakland, CA, contemporary artists in Kansas City, MO, and various residents of Munich, Germany.

Barry Anderson received a BFA from the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, with a concentration in photography in 1991, and an MFA from the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, with a concentration in Photography and Digital Media in 2002. Anderson’s recent solo exhibitions have shown at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas, the Byron C. Cohen Gallery for Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and the Roger Williams University Video Gallery, Providence, Rhode Island.  He currently lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Always Becoming Something is made possible in part by a grant from the Horizons Grants Program of the Salina Arts & Humanities Commission, City of Salina.
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For more information regarding Barry Anderson’s presentation or exhibition contact the Salina Art Center at 785-827-1431, or visit http://www.salinaartcenter.org.  The Art Center is located at 242 S. Santa Fe, Salina, Kansas.  Business office hours are from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday.  Art Center galleries are open from noon – 5:00 pm, Wednesday through Saturday, and 1:00 – 5:00 pm on Sunday