Andi Crist: Office Hours

Dec 7, 2024 - Jan 18, 2025

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present Andi Crist: Office Hours. The concept of a workspace evokes anecdotal and analogical relationships between people, objects, and space. Artist Andi Crist’s work considers the conceptual implications of her artistic practice and as a person whose labor is wrapped up in a particular kind of thinking-space meshed with a production-space. Incorporating chalk objects sculpted and cast from items around the artist’s studio - her own office/study/workplace - the site-specific installation explores the artist’s role as a laborer within the constructed framework of an office – where identity is often tied to a task, role, or location. 

Crist’s tools create and erase a full-scale office environment on the gallery walls, wearing their form away as they trace the outline of this “typical” workspace. The chalk becomes an ironic metaphor for the impermanence of labor and the erosion of identity tied to ‘the job,’ highlighting the artist’s role in the churn of production. Here, the act of drawing is both a labor and a loss, a reminder of how the work we do defines us, only to eventually be worn away and painted over in the next iteration of a blank slate. 

There is a cyclical nature to creation and erasure, building and disassembling, flatness and the surrounding nature of a space. The tools here dissolve and blur the boundary between production and the temporal nature of display, gesture, and effort. The process reveals a role within a system of continuous production and erosion, confronting the transient nature of work and the workplace. This installation poses questions around the durability of labor and the objects it yields, and exposes the deep irony that exists in investing time and energy into a space that will ultimately disappear when it becomes a host for another iteration of creative expression. 

About the Artist
My sculptural practice is deeply influenced by my career as a professional art-handler and fabricator. I work with a diverse range of media, including woodworking, ceramics, leather craft, and mold-making/casting to explore the various roles and representations of the artist as a worker. By pairing humor and skepticism with traditional craft techniques, I aim a critical eye at the value systems within the arts economy and the underlying systems that perpetuate them, such as language, architecture, and social economics. The interplay of absurdity and utility in my work challenges intellectualism, reflecting a serious dedication to craftsmanship and the belief that being a “master-of-none is better than a master-of-one.” Grounded in their real-world iterations, my work explores the blurry boundaries and integral relationship between work, play and practice. With keen self-awareness and a sardonic approach to the gallery as a white cube, my work incites critical examinations of contemporary industrialized studio practices. By doing so, I seek to foster a dialogue that questions and redefines traditional art values and acknowledges the architecture that underlies our work. 

Andi Crist: Office Hours is part of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago's 2024 Open Call, an exhibition program that aims to present new and exceptional work by a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago.