Interview with Stephanie Andrews
Our latest installment of SDA community member Stephanie Andrews interviewed by Akari Komura! Stephanie join SDA in Spring 2020, and played an essential role in planning and creating our inaugural virtual exhibition - Liminal Beings - which launched in April 2021.
Stephanie Andrews is an installation artist, experience designer, and instructor at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. She brings to her art practice a multidisciplinary background spanning software engineering, interaction design, public policy, social work, and community organizing.
More about Stephanie Andrews
Image Description: Stephanie Andrews, an Asian American woman wearing a gray hoodie and glasses pushed atop the top of her head is photographed in front of a fantastical digital landscape. Below a blue, lightly clouded sky, dark purple mushroom-like forms grow out of a black ground with white grid lines.
Interviewed by Akari Komura | June 2022
Akari Komura: How did you start making art and how did you get where you are right now?
Stephanie Andrews: I started making art as a way to connect with people, first with those closest to me and afterward for those I had yet to meet with too few means for connection. I decided to use new media as my first and primary medium for three reasons:
1 - I was a software engineer right before I became an artist and wanted to have my practice expand and deepen my technical ability;
2 - In some ways, I feel new media is one of the more accessible mediums to engage in — all you need is a computer and access to the internet; and,
3 - The art itself can be easily shared and built upon by others.
Akari Komura: That is so true that the new media has expanded the capacity of platforms to explore for artists in all kinds of discipline. And I did not know about your background as a software engineer! That is super cool how you transitioned to integrate your technical skills with the art-making. I am curious to hear more about how it felt like at the earlier stage of your artistic career when shifting your practice to include art. This might be a little difficult or weird question to think about but what is something you wish you could have shared with yourself when you started making art that is vital to who you are now?
Stephanie Andrews: I often feel that I move too slowly for our fast-paced world. I was behind, I thought, and even more so given how late I began my art practice and how little formal arts education I had.
This mentality drove me to setting ambitious and arbitrary goals that pushed me to both produce and burn out. It was only in recent years that I came to see the abundance of opportunity, as well as the opportunity to create more if no opportunities exist that are quite right. While before I’d create new work in response to a call, now I try to create more work that could stand on its own, and that could have its own measures of impact and success.
Akari Komura: Do you have any hobbies that inform your art practice?
Stephanie Andrews: I think socially playing games like Dominion, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and small indie titles has informed my practice most. I’ve also been gradually integrating CAD (computer-aided design) and digital fabrication into my practice in recent years.
Akari Komura: I am fascinated by reading these games that have informed your practice because they really connect with where some of your digital interactive works are coming from! I’ve actually explored your website and I got an impression that a lot of these digital interactive works are oriented by “playing.” Instead of a passive audience, I love how they engage us into a participatory experience. Have you always considered the audience as this active “player” role upon encountering your work or have your perspectives on how to show your work and engage with audiences changed over time?
Stephanie Andrews: From the very beginning, what’s typically compelled me to create art has been an abstract urge to problem-solve and explore new spaces using the means I have available. To that end I try to engage everything within those spaces as fully as possible, starting with myself and my immediate environment, then with others and our more expansive systems. I feel one of the deepest and most memorable forms of engagement is experiencing something curious, fun, strange, relatable, connecting, and thought-provoking. While I don’t always hit those marks, it’s something that I’ve always considered and centered in my work.
Akari Komura: Can you tell me a little about your creative process? Where do your pieces often start? Also, has your artistic style/approach evolved since joining Socially Distant?
Stephanie Andrews: My work is prompted by emerging sociopolitical issues, by empathy, and by sentimentality. I respond using whatever tools I have available to me. Sometimes that’s physical mediums, sometimes digital, sometimes a place between the two. What results is experiential at its core: site-specific installations, art games, multimedia experiences, and digital interactives comprise much of what I’ve done so far.
The past few years I’ve shifted my art to focus more on process. This was partly due to a renewed appreciation for depth found in taking things slow. But more than anything I realized how much of myself I was putting into my practice and how little was left for other things far more important to me. The pandemic reminded me of the importance of health and family, and of how little time we have for what we care about most. So now I leave myself room for life, for more thoughtfulness and care. I try to have my art embody that as much as I can.