Spring Break
Anderson's 'Pigeon' takes flight to Toronto
Jonathan Pearson
Issue date: 10/24/05 Section: Culture
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"I don't plan - I let life happen," said Anderson. "I let things flow and inspire me."
Anderson, who now has a video production on display at the Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, Ontario, knows that art and its inspiration can come from anything, anyone and anywhere.
"I tell my students that art is equal parts creativity and technical proficiency," he said. "It's like a language. Once you learn the foundation, it frees you. It can't come from anyone but yourself; it's self expression."
Anderson was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1969 and went to high school in Nacogdoches, Texas. His love for comics sparked his interest in art when he was a child. He had a huge interest in them and for as long as he could remember he wanted to be an artist.
"I had to learn all about art and art history in high school and began painting but after a while, I was intrigued by photography, so I decided to focus more on that," Anderson said.
After high school, he went to the University of Texas-Austin for his bachelor of fine arts degree in photography in 1991. Later, he went to graduate school for his master of fine arts degree at Indiana University for photography and digital media. He graduated in the spring of 2002 and is in his fourth year teaching here at UMKC.
The project on display in Toronto is a single video, about four years old, entitled "Pigeon."
On a trip to Italy, Anderson went out with his video camera looking for things that had potential for motion or something to occur. He noticed a pigeon drinking water from a fountain and decided to record it. In the video, he transforms the pigeon into something more poetic than simply a bird. The pigeon seems to stare at Barry while occasionally dipping his beak into the water to take a drink and let the water trickle down its feathers.
"I decided to record the pigeon and months later, I began thinking about-it was funny to me," said Anderson. "I had no idea what I was going to come up with and suddenly, I made a piece of art out of it."
