LINK TO IMAGES FROM THE EXHIBITION

Stephen Andrews admits to a fascination with technology "because it can never do what the hand can do, which is to fail miserably. The machine can draw a perfectly straight line - the hand refuses. Technology thus becomes a prosthesis for our shortcomings. When I in turn render by hand what the machine has wrought, my intention is to decipher the medium's message." Since the 1980s, Andrews has worked to display what is hidden or repressed using drawing, etching, image transfer processes, and digital imaging techniques in order to produce work that deals with memory, identity, the body and the body politic.

For the last couple of years, Andrews has been working through the fascination and the horror of the news coverage of the war in Iraq. In an artist's statement that accompanied an exhibition of his work at Cue Art Foundation in the fall of 2004 entitled "Collateral Damage," Andrews wrote: "In early 2003, I started searching the internet for photographic evidence of the war that was not being reported in the mainstream press. Web-based news sites offered a rather different picture. Photos of 'collateral damage' captured the obscenity of war in all its pornographic detail. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, these images are now ubiquitous. Like all pornographic and violent pictures, they tap into something instinctual, eliciting some gesture in response.

"... [T]he drawings re-create the look of four-color reproduction using a homemade separation technique. They are done as rubbings using window screening and crayons. The process softens the colors to a pastel palette, reminiscent of children's book illustration. The contrast of the war imagery with the pastel color scheme brings to mind the moral tales of the Brothers Grimm. Gruesome lessons in a candy coating."

For the exhibition at Platform, entitled "Between Before and After," the artist says the new work bridges "a shift that has happened in the direction of the drawings. I really felt that looking at the horror of war for a couple of years was burning a hole in the center of me.

"The images of war are viral and indelible. Once they go in you can't get them out.

"The shift I am describing has been to find imagery that is more beatific, that is to say illustrative of some kind of transformative moment that may or may not be redemptive. 'Going into the light' may be a description of the moment of dying that we the living can understand or it may signal a coming out of a time of darkness." The work ultimately is about hope.

Stephen Andrews was born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario Canada. He has exhibited his work in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Scotland, France, India and Japan. He is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, as well as many private collections.