October Anderson

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Current Exhibition:

October 19 - November 23, 2024.

limina, lumina,,

Lindsey Harald-Wong, Narong Tintamusik, Catherine Menard, Daniel Schubert, October Anderson, Mayolo Figueroa, Kento Saisho

Location: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (4478 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, 90016).

Type: Group Exhibition.

Documentation:

+ Checklist.

Release:

+ File.

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Bio

October Anderson (b. 1999, Los Angeles) is an American, trans-nonbinary, interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Anderson’s installations, performances, and works on paper investigate the optics of intelligence and the (mis)use of language as a site of knowledge production. Anderson has previously exhibited in Bolsky Gallery (Los Angeles), Intersect Gallery (Los Angeles), and The Folk Lounge (Los Angeles), and several of their works belong to the private collections of affiliates of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Otis College of Art and Design, among others. Anderson earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design in 2024, having graduated with the Joseph Mugnaini Award for Distinction in Drawing and the Distinction in Studio Art Award.

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October Anderson is an interdisciplinary artist producing work through text, performance, sculpture, and installation. Anderson utilizes innocuous, single-use materials such as pressure-sensitive tape in conjunction with archival paper to generate discourse around how worth is afforded to information through convenience, reverence, and visibility. Anderson’s work investigates Western notions of intelligence and what it means to cultivate the authority of expertise under capitalistic ideals. Anderson invents time-consuming systems of organization with the intention of creating situations in which their own labor is disregarded to expose the arbitrary nature of value. Anderson is a lover of the hybridized, always meaning for their work to function as contradictory, all-at-once and nothing-at-all. In this way, Anderson finds themself engaged in both the mimicry and mockery of the value systems they critique. To Anderson, mimicry serves as a pathway to agency and a means to become an impactful dupe, while mockery is a kind of prestige that unveils new knowledges as perceptions of truth begin to crack. By examining the rituals, gestures, and aesthetics of colonial intelligence, and its resulting systems of authority, Anderson reveals both the arbitrary nature of Western logics and the violence that comes with seeing intellect as stagnant and universal. Anderson’s practice is informed by trans linguistics, reconfiguration, and Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the Third Space.

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A note Tapes IV (November 2024\ limina, lumina,, )

One of the first conversations I had with October was about what’s supposed to happen “in a gallery”: what should be looked at and photographed, or what should be avoided or ignored; basically, what counts as “the art,” what is limited to “the gallery.”(They had mentioned photographing a vent or some other artefact of a gallery’s utility, and this act had soured on the side of the management.) I was left wondering: What is valued? What should be enjoyed? What could be crossed? (And how does the policing of artworks in a gallery or museum echo other relations between desire, value, and stasis or control (of optics and the movements of bodies in spaces)?)

This doubled work, with one part on the wall and its spectral image diagonally displayed on the floor, poses two different realities of the artwork: one that has to be transgressed, walked-on… and one that plays a bit nicer with the conventions of a gallery, up-on-the-wall. (But even this work is a double-agent, perhaps still-sticky enough to grab bits of passing dust.) The part on the floor is iterated with what remains of what stuck to the part on the wall, as if it fell off the front of the work from behind.

Instead of assuming an already-precious position in the archive, their work archives its own activity. Showing the dorsals and ventrals of fragmented—but repeated—images and informations plucked by sticky tape, the work collects and records, rather than repels or staves-off, the time of the process that continues through exhibition and storage. It gives an unauthorized account of itself. 

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Exhibitions with the Gallery: