Andrea Myers Uses Art-Making to Generate Community Connectivity

By Raygan Barrett, communications manager at Dublin Arts Council

Andrea Myers was commissioned by Dublin Arts Council to complete a Riverbox this fall. Riverboxes are artist-created vessels that are inspired by the hobbies of letterboxing and geocaching, which combine GPS skills and artistic pursuit with delightful ‘treasure hunts’ in Dublin, Ohio’s scenic parks.

Raygan: Tell me about your creative process and what inspires you.
Andrea:  My creative process explores the space between two and three dimensionality, focusing on color, pattern, texture and scale. I use abstraction as a lens to translate my everyday observations and feelings into immersive color fields and forms. I am inspired by landscapes, both real and imagined.

Raygan: In your work, you often use saturated colors; what draws you to that palette?
Andrea: I believe that color has the power to draw attention and shift a landscape, and I focus on the impact of color to enliven environments. In my textile works, fabric functions like tubes of paint, assembling pieces that converge into concentrated technicolor. Neon serves as my punctuation, coming in and out of focus across soft planes.

I am deeply immersed in color and color interactions in all my work. I am constantly struck by the power of certain color combinations and how working with various saturations of color I can create energy and mood within individual works. I often think about how each day I am working in the studio, it is mapping a moment in time and the colors I choose on one day might be different the next day and how much that might depend on my mood, the weather or other more subconscious factors.

Raygan: How is your approach different for public art versus in-gallery installations? How has it affected the choice of materials you use?
Andrea: My artistic practice incorporates a wide range of materials, ranging from donated fabric-sewn collages to immersive outdoor hand-painted murals to digitally printed banner installations. I’m sensitive to choosing materials that spark metaphor while considering the site and longevity of the work. Scale is a significant contributing factor to my public versus commercial gallery works. The public art pieces I have created are very site specific and site responsive and I carefully consider how they will be experienced by the audience.

Raygan: How has public art transformed your art practice?
Andrea: Public art has served my work, and in tandem, I am in service to my public art. Working within the realm of public art, I have been able to amplify my voice and increase my audience while also creating audience participation. Connectivity to community is really important to me; it is one of the deep powers of art-making — a way to impact and inspire a space, an individual and beyond.

Raygan: Why is public art important to you?
Andrea: Public art is important to me because art has a limited existence without an audience. I feel it is important to share my ideas within communities, creating space in the work for the audience to be a co-author. My work involves immersive patterning and abstraction, which I feel are universally accessible to the public of all ages and demographics, enabling the viewers to use their imaginations and experiences to participate within the works.

Raygan: What is the best thing about the Columbus art scene?
Andrea: What I find really great about being a working artist in Columbus over the last 14 years is the positivity and genuine spirit of community amongst artists and arts organizations in the city. I grew up in Westerville and moved to Chicago for 10 years while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a portion of my undergraduate time and for graduate school. I moved back in 2010 after becoming a mom and wanting to live near my family again. While it was bittersweet leaving Chicago, I was immediately so impressed by the support and enthusiasm of the arts community in Columbus. It only continues to grow bigger and bigger over time and I am really excited to live in Columbus and be part of the art world here at this moment in time.

See Andrea Myers’ commissioned Riverbox alongside other Riverboxes in Dublin’s scenic parks. For more information, visit dublinarts.org.

This article is part of a bi-weekly column brought to you by the Greater Columbus Arts Council as part of the Art Makes Columbus campaign. Explore a calendar of events, public art database and artist stories at columbusmakesart.com. To learn more about GCAC grants visit gcac.org.