By Avery Lokers
The Paul Collins Art Gallery, located on the fourth floor of Raleigh J. Finkelstein Hall in Grand Rapids Community College, is home to a shifting collection of featured artworks.
From the month of October and until Nov. 14, the gallery features GRCC’s own photography professor Andrew Caldwell. The collection, titled “Welcome to Andyland,” is open to the public Monday through Thursday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Within the gallery walls, Caldwell displays meaningful works from a 10-year-long period of personal photographic experimentation.
“I think of myself as a remix artist as much as a photographer,” he stated.
This is prevalent in the visuals of the gallery, with combined video and collage photo elements. He revealed that he makes his work feel unique to him by combining multiple aspects of media, making it something completely his own and never seen before.
In an email to The Collegiate, Caldwell explained that when one finds a passion so strong within themselves and builds a career around that passion, eventual creative burnout can be unavoidable.
He stated that eventually, “your passion is no longer your passion, it’s just work. This drove me to start creating again.”
Because of this, Caldwell’s top advice for young artists striving to build a career around their art is by finding ways to bring personal touches of creativity into every project one makes.
He recalled a defining moment in his career was just a year ago, when he was commissioned by a viewer of his ArtPrize entry. He said that this was his first client in 20 years that allowed him creative freedom within business, which he described as being sweet after so long spent on impersonal work.
“I was able to work with a client making art that was mine but for someone else,” he stated.
In Caldwells life, he experienced his adoration for photography growing from a very young age, which progressed into a successful career in commercial photography and videography. Over time he found the importance of reconnecting to the art through personal creations, such as the pieces shown in “Welcome to Andyland,” in GRCC’s gallery.
In this gallery, filled with vibrant scenery of moving clouds above Appalachia, Caldwell expresses his journey in not only reconnection with himself, but his discoverance of connection to his ancestral and racial identity.
The clouds in his series “Andylachia” symbolize ever changing feelings about his experience of being a Black mixed-race person living in Appalachia. He describes this symbolism in terms of the cloud patterns changing throughout the day being akin to the cycle of his shifting feelings about his home in Appalachia.
He stated, “Most days during the summer start with a clear sky, puffy clouds start building around noon, it’s storming by 3 p.m., and it’s glorious just in time for sunset. This unstable cycle summarized a lot of my experiences there. Love it, like it, meh, hate it, wanna leave and love it again.”
Cloud watching proves to be an impactful habit of Caldwell’s life and journey. Spoken about in his gallery artist statement as well as depicted in his work, he stresses the connectedness of all of us under the same sky.
“If we would just slow down and pay attention…”, he stated, relating to the portrayal of cloud watching in his collection, “we’ll find healing through shared experience. The art we make is a piece of ourselves and while individual experiences wildly differ, the threads of shared experience are there to be discovered.”
Caldwell further urges that it is so important to experience the gallery in person, as opposed to through a computer screen. For the same reason that he loves cloud watching and creating, he understands the power of being present in the world.
He stresses that “there’s so many beautiful things happening all around us all the time, they need our attention, too!”
