Heartbreak Bar

A series of bar-shaped sculptures populates Derosia's main gallery. Each is coarse and condensed, featuring figures embedded in their architecture. Some hold red, green, or blue light, creating an RGB landscape of private monologues; a psychic space where grief, joy, and loneliness cross paths.

The sculptures consider a handful of literary sources set in bars. An intoxicated Miss Lonelyhearts (Nathaniel West) answers letters from the desperate and disillusioned. A saloon full of dead-end alcoholics drift purposelessly from day to day in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. "The Angel of Loneliness" visits a failed country singer in between sips of his beer in Robert Ashley's Dust. Despite many references to the theater, Anderson's sculptures remain static objects activated by the viewer who must consider them against their own subjectivity.

In a separate series installed in the gallery's back room, three wall works house figures constructing taxi cabs from various materials. The figures stitch together a Frankensteined stand-in for the father, and while the taxi is the object of focus, the impulse to repair something internally is the subject. In her poem "Daddy," Sylvia Plath calls hers a "bag full of God." Here the model hardens where Pygmalion's came alive.