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The mind-boggling complexity of Andrea Way’s mixed media drawings makes for a masterful encounter with a creative practice that absorbs traditions of mapping, diagrammatic abstraction, meditation and harrowingly fine mark making. Oddly, the viewer experiences a shock of self-awareness when confronted with Way’s intensely sustained attention to rigorous, rule-based methods of working. The unfaltering focus required by this work and the willingness of the artist to give herself over to its time-stopping pace is a singular devotional act But more than the mental rigor, meditative presence and finely calibrated delicacy this work demands, it is the multivalent references to science, aboriginal maps, linear schematics, the Outsider Art of Hiroyuki Doi, and Terry Winters’ graphic work from the late ’90s that give Way’s drawings their richness and allure. Way’s works also align positively those of Bruce Conner, Mark Tobey and John Cage, all of which were on view at the Crocker Art Museum’s 2012 exhibition, Approaching Infinity: The Richard Green Collection of Meticulous Abstraction.
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