Exhibition to be celebration of life and mourning
Dead cicadas, an ice block, a bearded mouth.
Andrew Leo Stansbury’s pictures documenting a process of mourning, which he sees as a celebration of life. will be at the centre of a new exhibition, Passed|past, at Might Could in New Plymouth.
The Texan artist said, his art was a public recognition of the grief he experienced after his mum died, as mourning was an overlooked, beautiful aspect of life.
Stansbury, who was a ceramic teacher, said he had to be his disabled mother’s caregiver from an early age and he remembered being a 5-year-old kid pushing the grocery cart from a store.
Later in life, he studied art and ceramics at university in Massachusetts, and learnt how art was activated by the body, he said.
He started documenting and photographing live performances, where he would cover his body in heavy, shiny and gooey ceramics mixed with fake blood or marshmallow fluff.
“Fluff is a wonderful ingredient that can be used in art practices ... because it lasts forever, it’s just two ingredients egg whites and sugar.
“It’s a New England sandwich material – they eat that with peanut butter. It’s disgusting. It’s called a fluffernutter. And I came to love and despise it,” he said.
Stansbury said the materials he used to cover his body were masks that would allow him to be vulnerable and avoid the restraints of society.
“I am not trained to [entertain] an audience watching performance art. I prefer more of a circus or a carnivalesque style where you kind of go into the crowd and interact with them,” he said.
When his mother’s condition suddenly deteriorated, Stansbury started documenting the illness and, in the end, art became a revelation of the grieving moment.
He pictured dried flowers that were turning into ash like his mother’s skin, as well as MRIS that showed her kidneys’ failure.
As he was living in Minnesota when his mother died, Stansbury said intense blizzards almost stopped him from attending the funeral in Texas.
He depicted this fear in a picture where dead cicadas frozen in an ice block could be seen coming out of his mouth.
Stansbury said he would travel to New Zealand for the opening of the exhibition on Thursday.