Opening of Sneeze Dreams: Paintings by Andrew Swenson

Sneeze Dreams
Opening: Friday, October 13, from 6-9 pm
Closing Reception: Friday, November 3, 2023

Sneeze Dreams is Andrew Swenson’s MFA thesis show, the culmination of three years of studying painting and drawing at the University of New Mexico. This show highlights five paintings made in the last year. The artworks chart an alchemical journey of self where Andrew reflects upon psychedelic, dream, and hallucinatory experiences. Imaginative meditations on these mental states fuel an idiosyncratic interdimensional viewpoint. Themes of ego-loss, soul-manifestation, and engines-of-being are presented through sun-drenched mystical perception. Formal choices in the paintings reflect a dialogue with the hxstories of figuration, craft, and visual perception. The paintings strive to hold a gray zone of multiplicity where conflation, mutualism, antithesis and contrast of concepts interweave. Andrew invites the viewer to explore their own introspective dream states through this work.

Andrew Swenson is a visual artist and MFA candidate in the painting and drawing program at the University of New Mexico, located on the ancestral homelands of the TIWA people. He grew up in Minnesota and got his undergraduate degrees in ceramics and psychology from the University of Minnesota, which is located on the traditional homelands of the Dakota people. His work is an ongoing meditation on psychedelic, dream, and hallucinatory experiences.

The exhibition is viewable by appointment between October 13 and November 3.