Phylogeny via Mandala (14)
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Andrew Mount was born in Liverpool, UK. He graduated with a BA (Hons) in Painting from the University of Reading, UK. He went on to complete an MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College, NY and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at Teacher’s College, Columbia University.
Mount’s work has shifted from painting to installations, video, and, most recently, to books. Throughout, he has consistently developed motifs and processes to generate structures. His books have developed in a similar way, through an image bank constructed over the last eight years that contains a wide array of images (from raw photos to manipulated images that use digital techniques such as collage montage, masks or interlacing). The fact that it is digital allows the contents of the archive to be used within a range of applications, lending an immediacy of execution that reflects the digital nature of the source. The image bank allows Mount to work quickly, and engage with a cycle of constant production, skipping through media and scales. For example, Mount makes books with his images, and simultaneously extracts some of those images to print them for alternate uses. In other cases, he have been transferring images into sculptural/installation works. These images are both printed and used within the books to enact research into the politicization of images through the application of techniques such as repetition, juxtaposition, contrast, degraded image quality, mimicry, and exploitation. Resulting images resist narration even at the level of photo-essay and attempt to access the other forms of communicability between imagery and the human imagination. This in some cases lies in a form of figuration that appeals directly to sensation, and in others within a phenomenological form of image construction.
As Mount builds interconnections between images and projects, the proximity between images becomes fertile terrain for him to work within. mount approaches images as processes, rather than objects, he is interested in language and the creation of a visual language. Ultimately this work appears to be preoccupied with systems, some germane to aesthetics, some to articulation, some to the rationalization of an image, and the political implications of these processes. The systems present in Mount’s work address art history, etymology, phylogenic memory, and political image structures.
Mount has exhibited in New York, London, and Germany.
Andrew Mount is also co-founder of FLUX Arts Space, an non-profit arts organization committed to commissioning and presenting art projects and educational programs that expose underprivileged communities to digital art and culture. He was the Director of ThINC Gallery, Syracuse, NY and Dowd Gallery, SUNY Cortland, NY. He has curated numerous exhibitions both in the USA and internationally and has as well developed educational projects and programs for national educational organizations. Mount has taught art, art education, and arts administration at Teachers College, Columbia University and Syracuse University, NY. He was recently awarded a curatorial residency in Copenhagen, DK, and was recently a resident artist at Residency Unlimited.