Artist Statement
Thompson is an imperfectionist. He cuts and punctures, stitches, and stains. He does to photographs what mankind is doing to the planet. Thompson’s practice has a punk edge. Destruction as creation with metaphoric aims. His markers of scruffy inland Southern California—palm trees, power lines—are intentionally generic: a place, not this exact place. And his work contains a strong streak of environmental activism. “It’s no longer authentic to create pristine images of grand landscapes. That’s obvious. The actual landscapes are falling apart in front of us. On the other hand, if we’re already on the road to ruining everything, there’s an intense freedom in that.” – Doug McCulloh, UCR/California Museum of Photography
Bio
Andrew K. Thompson is a photographic artist working in Southern California. His work has been exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, California; The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture; The Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado; Gallery 1/1, Seattle, Washington; and Klotz Gallery, New York, NY.
His work has been reviewed in Art in the Plague Year Processes the Experience, LA Weekly by Shana Nys Dambrot (March 18, 2021), Being Here and There: Ambiguous Boundaries and Contested Terrains, KCET Artbound by Larissa Nickel, Los Angeles, CA (January 2015); and The Here and Now: From A to Z: Contemporary Landscape Photography at MOAH, Artillery Magazine by Colin Westerbeck, Los Angeles, CA (March 2015).
His images were a featured post on the AIPADphoto Instagram page (July 7, 2021); the exhibition catalog for In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California – 1950 to the Present (2019) published by Inlandia Institute, Riverside, CA; and The Hand issue nineteen (2018).
Thompson co-founded The Little Gallery of San Bernardino, a community-based artist-run space focusing on San Bernardino and the greater Inland Empire.