Entropy Plan for the Western Fam

Entropy Plan for the Western Fam, Yes We Cannibal, Baton Rouge, LA, March 22–April 1, 2022

Entropy Plan for the Western Fam is an exhibition of recent video, painting, and works on collaged paper. The show title’s plays on Joseph Beuys’ 1974 tour of lectures and performances in the United States, “Energy Plan for the Western Man.” Beuys’ interactions with his audience were meant to serve as a continual energy source to solve the ecological and spiritual problems of the time. Yet half a century later, these crises still confront us—as we are confronted by Anderson’s large-scale artwork on paper that sprawls across the gallery’s floor. The crumpled cross-section of a hewn tree finds its concentric circles echoed in a precarious assembly of paintings on shaped canvasses—a rusted memorial to deforestation.

On the gallery’s large video screen, two performers in bright orange jumpsuits encircle the trunk of a large tree with a string of bells, sounding out an arboreal dance in the forest rainfall.

This lush, dripping environment reverberates in three artworks in air-blown ink on collaged paper over panel—root-like, calligraphic flows of earthy colors that form their own vegetal logic. Hovering far above all from the ceiling is a small work on black paper of the full moon. It shines down with a sense of lunatic pull between entropic chaos and verdant potentialities.