OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2023
7:00 - 10:00 PM
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
EXHIBITION RUNS THROUGH APRIL 21, 2023
HOW TO KNOW THE FERNS : A SOLO EXHIBITION FEATURING STEVEN L. ANDERSON
Kai Lin Art is pleased to announce our second exhibition for 2023, HOW TO KNOW THE FERNS : a solo exhibition featuring new artworks from Atlanta-based artist Steven L. Anderson.
Steven L. Anderson
How to Know the Ferns {Artist Statement}
“How to Know the Ferns is a new body of paintings and drawings from Atlanta artist Steven L. Anderson.
Anderson’s ongoing look at the power of Nature and the nature of power focuses here through the lens of historical research. Art and science meet in two books, “Ferns of Georgia” (Rogers McVaugh & Joseph H. Pyron, 1951), and “How to Know the Ferns” (Frances Theodora Parsons, 1927 ed.). These wonderful collections of botanical line drawings present a close observation of the leafy plants, while imagining them as either soft, lilting, fainting, dainty beings; or as flattened, deterministic vessels of scientific study. Both adhere to Western culture’s tendency to reduce knowledge into categories, and to drain experience of its color.
Anderson aims to return a spirit of energy, wonder, and power to these pages. Experiments with bright inks, acrylics, and oils emphasize the true strangeness of these plant forms. Generative, fractal mark-making threatens to plunge the artist into exponential iterations of labor. Retinal vibrations bring the viewer into the madness. Poured auras imbue a glimpse of nature’s magic. The ferns begin to gain their own agency as mesmerizing, wise, forest weirdies.”
Steven L. Anderson is an exhibiting artist, and Co-Director of Day & Night Projects, an artist-run gallery in Atlanta that he helped originate in 2016.
Anderson is a graduate of the University of Michigan and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States since 1996. His artworks are found in the Microsoft Art Collection, the Tim & Lauren Schrager Collection, and in collections of Fulton County Public Arts, Coca-Cola Inc., Emory University Hospitals, the National Park Service, and others. Anderson’s sketchbooks are in the permanent collection of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University.
Anderson is a two-time winner of the Artists Project Grant from the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs. He was an Artist-in-Residence at Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge, LA in March 2022, and at Atlanta’s Blue Heron Nature Preserve for the year of 2021. He was a recipient of the 2019 Denis Diderot [A-i-R] Grant at Château d’Orquevaux Artist Residency in Orquevaux, France. Anderson was a TAR Project Therapeutic Artist Resident in 2016–17, has been a Studio Artist at Atlanta Contemporary (2013–16), a 2015 Hambidge Center Distinguished Fellow, and a 2014–15 WonderRoot Walthall Artist Fellow.
Anderson’s day job is Senior Graphic Designer and Studio Manager at the Office of Undergraduate Admission at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Liz and son Finn.