Local Artist displays work at Grossmont College

LA MESA — At Hyde Gallery on the campus of Grossmont Community College, “Multiplicity” by Lea Anderson is now featured. The installation is a collection of three of her full-scale mixed media works spanning across the gallery walls.

The first impulse felt upon seeing Anderson’s art is to run up close and gaze at the intricacies. The drawings of cells, amoeba-like creatures, and forms suggesting primitive life forms make the viewer giddy with memories.

LA MESA — At Hyde Gallery on the campus of Grossmont Community College, “Multiplicity” by Lea Anderson is now featured. The installation is a collection of three of her full-scale mixed media works spanning across the gallery walls.

The first impulse felt upon seeing Anderson’s art is to run up close and gaze at the intricacies. The drawings of cells, amoeba-like creatures, and forms suggesting primitive life forms make the viewer giddy with memories.

Anderson’s art calls to mind the times of peering through the microscope in biology class during middle or high school. In fact, Anderson said that she did receive a lot of her ideas from the work she did in her science classes while obtaining a degree in art.

“It’s always a little nerve-wracking to wonder how my art will be installed,” Anderson admitted. “The gallery installation is always a little different each time.

“But I love what the Hyde Gallery has done,” she said.

So did others who came to see Anderson’s art on opening night. Even the children delighted in it. They danced and ran among the colored shadows stretching across the floor. The adults were content to sit talking among each other, gazing at the installation. They came early and stayed late.

Anderson’s “Memoryfeeld” is a collection of 1,000 acrylic gel transfer drawings linked together using acrylic, plastic, wood and wire. In her artist’s statement, Anderson explains that the piece represents a collection of past ideas, experiences and events.

The “Membrainchain” is a fantastical image of 675 laminated archival digital prints on acetate. Anderson received inspiration from an MRI image of a brain as it shifts, expands and contracts. She says that like living cells, ideas are separate.

One pod generates itself into 1,000 different versions of itself, Anderson explains about her “Millipod” work.

Arranged with 1,000 laminated archival digital prints on acetate, “Millipod” suggests the expanding possibilities in time, the mind and even the creative process. It simultaneously implodes and explodes, Twilight-Zone style.

A transplanted California native who has lived for the past eight years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Anderson has made her love of art into a living thing. Getting even more inspiration from the ever-changing landscapes of the desert, Anderson makes artistic inquiries into the formal variations she sees in natural systems.

The art installation is in memory of her late father, Steve Anderson, CEO of Santee Welding. “I was hoping he would still be around to see my work,” Anderson said. “He would be proud of me. He was always telling me that I needed to learn how to express myself.”