Andrew K. Thompson is a photographic artist from the Inland Empire of California. His work has been exhibited at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, the Riverside Art Museum, the California Museum of Photography, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Gallery 1/1, and Klotz Gallery.
Andrew was a competitive bicycle motocross (BMX) racer with a viral video about a frozen asparagus camera. He has been a member of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, a punk rock pro wrestling performance group, and was the founder and M.C. of Punk Rock Pillow Fight, a national pillow fighting tournament.
Musings on his work have appeared on Art Life 2.0 Podcast with Andrew K. Thompson hosted by Xrstine Franco, Claremont, CA (December 28, 2022); KVC_aRts 91.9 NPR, San Bernardino, California (August 16, 2017); The Golden Goal on Norwegian Television Channel TV2 (2012); and Saturday Night Live Weekend Update with Seth Meyers, S36 E22 (May 21, 2011).
His work has been reviewed in Art in the Plague Year Processes the Experience, LA Weekly by Shana Nys Dambrot (March 18, 2021), Being Here and There: Ambiguous Boundaries and Contested Terrains, KCET Artbound by Larissa Nickel, Los Angeles, CA (January 2015); and The Here and Now: From A to Z: Contemporary Landscape Photography at MOAH, Artillery Magazine by Colin Westerbeck, Los Angeles, CA (March 2015).
His images were a featured post on the AIPADphoto Instagram page (July 7, 2021); Dotphotozine Issue #10 (2021) published by Cal State San Bernardino Photography Department, San Bernardino, CA; and the exhibition catalog for In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California - 1950 to the Present (2019) published by Inlandia Institute, Riverside, CA.
Thompson co-founded The Little Gallery of San Bernardino (TLGSB), a community-based artist-run space focusing on San Bernardino and the greater Inland Empire. TLGSB has presented over 30 solo and group exhibitions featuring artists of various ages, genders, and identifications for six years and counting.
Doug McCulloh, Senior Curator at UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography:
"Early in the pandemic lockdown, Andrew K. Thompson commenced a set of images under the title Chemical Landscapes – Scarring Land & Time. The photographs depict “an apocalyptic vision of nature’s future,” he states. Thompson is an imperfectionist. He cuts and punctures, stitches and stains. He does to photographs what mankind is doing to the planet. Thompson’s practice has a punk edge. Destruction as creation with metaphoric aims. His markers of scruffy inland Southern California—palm trees, power lines—are intentionally generic: a place, not this exact place. And his work contains a strong streak of environmental activism. “It’s no longer authentic to create pristine images of grand landscapes. That’s obvious. The actual landscapes are falling apart in front of us. On the other hand, if we’re already on the road to ruining everything, there’s an intense freedom in that.”
SHANA NYS DAMBROT, LA Weekly, ART IN THE PLAGUE YEAR PROCESSES THE EXPERIENCE:
Andrew K. Thompson (Colton, CA) offers works from his ongoing Chemical Landscapes – Scarring Land & Time series, begun early in the quarantine experience, and honoring the physical threats of apocalyptic social and climate upheaval in photo-based works which are torn, punctured, sewn together, and stained in embodied images of the destruction in which we are all complicit.