Andrea Guskin: Unfurling
March 29 – May 4, 2024
Andrea Guskin works across the disciplines of photography, installation, and painting to create objects, images, and spaces where the familiar converses with the existential. She explores the act of unfurling as a way of seeking knowledge. Through the use of light and spice, her work reflects research ranging from quantum physics to her ancestry.
Fascinated with recent efforts to read an ancient scroll using a particle accelerator beam, Guskin began researching the structures related to quantum physics–from the Large Hadron Collider to quantum entanglement—and creating light installations in the Mills College Greek amphitheater. In the resulting photographs, the distorted internal structures of the accelerators became voids of possibility and a contemplation on the fragility of existence.
Guskin carried these explorations into the dark room, creating photogram spice portraits of her family’s ancestral background. She used her breath to move the combinations of spice across the paper. Through exposure to light, the tiny particles allude to the expanse of outer space—drawing a connection between the intimate, the everyday, and the vast.
Gallery
Andrea Guskin
Andrea Guskin is a San Francisco Bay Area based artist working across multiple disciplines including photography, sculpture, and painting to create objects and installations where the familiar converses with the existential. With interests in quantum physics, ancestral archives, and Buddhist philosophy, she transforms everyday materials—spices, funnels, foil, thread—to explore our relationship to the vast, from microscopic particles to deep space. After studying painting at Antioch College in Ohio, Guskin moved to New York City and became part of the art and songwriting communities on the Lower East Side. Since moving to California in 2003, she has regularly exhibited her work throughout California, often combining her experience in museum education (The Oakland Museum,The Contemporary Jewish Museum) with her creative practice to lead participatory art events throughout the Bay Area including the Richmond Art Center, Berkeley Art Center, The Drawing Room, and the Red Poppy Art House. Guskin graduated with an M.F.A in Interdisciplinary Arts from Mills College at Northeastern University.