Yesterday’s news, remembered today

To view artwork and installation images, click here


Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present Yesterday’s news, remembered today, an exhibition by Stephen Andrews focused on his Iraqi war drawings from 2003-2005.


"Intuitively, I was drawn to ordering that chaos in the same way that my previous work had been trying to rationalize or grapple with grief - the work that I made in the eighties and nineties in response to the AIDS epidemic. That was a collective grief. The impulse I had after 9/11 was the same: to start ordering things. Searching the internet was a much more complicated process at that point in time." --Stephen Andrews, 2018, Aftermath, McMichael Canadian Art Collection


"Like everyone, I have been both fascinated and horrified by the news coverage of the war in Iraq. 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.

Like my paintings, the 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.

Websites, like newspapers and magazines before them, deliver us the world in a neat four-color package. By directing our gaze to the dots that make up the pictures, I hope to interrogate the technological interface that delivers the message, to reveal through formal means the role that technology plays in constructing meaning. In the process of re-creating these digital images by hand, I want to explore the inevitable tension between my subjectivity (the hand of the artist) and these objectified digital 'moments'." --Stephen Andrews, 2004, Stephen Andrews, Cue Art Foundation, NYC (Link is a downloadable compressed pdf)


Stephen Andrews was born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including photography, drawing, animation, painting and ceramics. Over the last twenty five years he has exhibited his work across Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Scotland, France, Italy and Japan, including POV, a fifteen-year survey at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2015). He is represented in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Belkin Art Gallery, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, the Schwartz Collection, Harvard amongst many others, and corporate art collections including Torys (Toronto), Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt (Toronto), the Royal Bank of Canada, National Bank of Canada, TD Canada Trust and the Bank of Montreal. Andrews is a recipient of the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts (2019).