Today we’d like to introduce you to Andrew K. Thompson.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was a self-taught photographer growing up in Temple City through the eighties and nineties. In ninety-three, I moved to San Francisco, earned a BFA in photography, and began working as a photo assistant around town. During this time, I joined a night club-based wrestling troop called Incredibly Strange Wrestling (ISW). I did a few tours with ISW before moving to New York. There, I did the Brooklyn artist thing, worked as a preparator in a couple of galleries in Chelsea, and organized Punk Rock Pillow Fight (PRPF) events in nightclubs. I returned to Southern California to earn my MFA, which I got at CSU, San Bernardino. Shortly after graduation, I co-founded The Little Gallery of San Bernardino (TLGSB) with my partner Eric Servin. TLGSB is four years old and still going. It is a platform that focuses on artists living and working in the Inland Empire.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, of course not! It has been a long, winding, and sometimes perilous journey. The easy part was always knowing that I wanted to be an artist regardless of adversity. The struggles include but are not limited to self-doubt, financial insecurity, housing insecurity, consent rejection, being overlooked, feeling invisible, losing loved ones to suicide, and having to do questionably legal things to make ends meet. Nothing is smooth about my artist’s journey, but I intentionally burned every escape route back to “normalcy” to ensure total commitment to my goal of being an artist.
Thankfully, these days, I feel like I have come through the rough parts and am living my dream. Anything I don’t have but wish I did, is based on ego and is unnecessary to for me to live a full and complete life.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Photography is my primary medium, but I have a very unorthodox stance on the topic. I distrust perfection, and I believe photography is poisonous. For all the positive things that have emerged from its invention, unforeseeable issues have followed, from the exploitation of land and people to pollution. I mix the toxicity of the medium with a dash of absurdity to create objects that reflect the world around me.
I am most known for brightly colored monochromes of Palm Trees and Power Lines throughout the Southern California basin that have been cut, punctured, sewn, and bleached. I am also proud of my online project @MeltingCamera that I completed over 2021. For five days a week over the entire year, I created frozen sculptures cast from early 2000s digital cameras out of homemade photo developer solutions. The ice cameras melted over 8×10 photo paper, causing development where the solution pooled. Daily melts were live-streamed on Twitch. A viral video about a frozen asparagus camera emerged from this project that jumped across multiple social media platforms.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
Endurance, combined with the philosophy that the harder you work, the luckier you get.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.AndrewKThompson.art, www.TheLittleGallerySB.com
- Instagram: @Andrew_K_Thompson, @Sewnphotographs, @MeltingCameras, @TheLittleGallery.SB
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theoneandonlyandrewkthompson/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-thompson-37591a15/
- Twitter: @ThompsonAndrew
- Youtube: @MeltingCameras
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@meltingcameras
