Steven L. Anderson’s work is about the power of Nature, and the nature of power. Alone and collaboratively, and across several media, Anderson engages in projects that look to nature as an evergreen source of metaphors for how we experience the world. Anderson’s artistic goal is “to make images, things, spaces, and situations that fuse the exhilaration of the human spirit with the ferocious beauty of Nature to make a palpable, tingling essence.”
The Tree Rings artworks are a way of growing a drawing: the artist draws circles with markers and pens that closely follow the circle before it, expanding as the rings build and bring the form into existence. Titled after the number of rings/years, these meditations on growth and the passage of time hope to provide a larger context for our lives. Where would our own activities, lifespans, and histories fit into the recordings made in tree rings? These drawings are at once a violent death, a time machine, a hypnotist’s tool, an energy vortex.
