Andrea Guskin

Lives and works in San Leandro, CA, USA

Artist statement

Andrea Guskin ARTIST STATEMENT I work across the disciplines of photography, installation, sculpture and painting to create objects, images, and spaces where the familiar converses with the existential. Through layering, ripping and transforming ordinary materials–spices, funnels, tape, wool– I explore our relationship to the vast and our methods for seeking knowledge. I draw inspiration from intersections between history and the present, science and spirituality, with a particular interest in quantum physics and Buddhist philosophy. Utilizing microscopes and analog processes, I use expanded photographic practices to untangle the fragments of both personal and collective archives and narratives, creating large multi-layered works on paper that are torn and mended. I combine blurred photographs of my ancestral archives with collected historical images, such as magic lantern glass slides taken in the early twentieth century New York neighborhood where my family first landed in America from the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe. With this work I am asking questions and tracking absence: what unknown elements of our family history do we carry with us in our bodies and minds? For my recent black and white photographic series, Theater of Seeking, Entangling and Unfurling (2023), I have been researching the use of powerful light beams generated by particle accelerators, ten billion times brighter than the sun, currently being used to create digital images of two thousand year old...

Artwork