Andrew K. Thompson is a photographic artist and educator working in Southern California. His lifelong relationship with photography has inspired him to earn an MFA in Studio Art and Design from the California State University, San Bernardino, a Certificate Degree in Art Business from New York University, and a BFA in Photography from the Academy of Art, San Francisco. He has exhibited throughout the United States at the California Museum of Photography, The Center for Fine Art Photography, the Klotz Gallery, Gallery 1/1, and the AIPAD photography show.
While on this journey, he has traveled the world as a member of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, was the founder and M.C. of Punk Rock Pillow Fight, and is a competitive BMX racer with a viral video about a frozen asparagus camera.
Musings on his work have appeared on Saturday Night Live, Norwegian TV, Montreal Radio, Fox 5 News, Time Out New York, Maxim Radio, and KVC_aRts.
Text about his projects has appeared in New York Magazine, the Huffington Post, The Village Voice, L.A.Weekly, Artillery Magazine, and KCET Artbound.
His images have appeared in the catalog for In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 to the Present, Dotphotozine, The Hand Magazine cover issue #19, and was a featured post on @AIPADphoto Instagram account page.
Thompson is the co-founder of The Little Gallery of San Bernardino.
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.