Andy Nicholas Li: It's not over when he comes

Exhibition Abstract

Or is it? When the person hasn't checked the time, the body has to feel it. It's not over when he comes is the thesis exhibition of Andy Nicholas Li (M.F.A. '25). Arranging images and sculptures in multiple scales and materials, Andy examines symbols and fantasies of masculinity where race, animality, selfhood, and sexuality demand questions on our intuition of what is true. A boy shoots an arrow. A tower stands, a stud of horses. A muscular white man expects something from you. Internalized in our collective psyche as individual fears and desires, these mechanisms reveal where the categories of man, boy, queer, and gay perpetuate and play with power.

Power necessitates the desire for relation; in the fallout lie discord, tension, attachment, abandonment, service, and control. With oil-based drawings, ceramics, video, and found materials, Li installs a poetic probing inside conflict: meeting the perimeters of care and violence, toy and weapon, lust and loss.

Exhibitor Biography

Andy Nicholas Li is an artist and educator based in Chicago, Illinois, and Ithaca, New York. Li's work has appeared at ACRE Projects, Co-Prosperity, Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), The Soil Factory (Ithaca), Midsumma Festival (Melbourne, Australia), and Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (Providence, RI), with collaborative projects at AS220 (Providence, RI), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Singapore Art Book Fair. Li has spent time at residencies and workshops at ACRE (Steuben, WI), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL), and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.