Working across sculpture, printmaking, and painting, Vander Veen’s practice is rooted in questions of identity, desire, and the relationship between abstraction and representation. Closeness centers on his ongoing engagement with an archive of gay erotic imagery, material he treats as a record of explicitly subversive, underground cultural production. Many of these images circulate online with simple geometric shapes obscuring their content, and this collision of censorship and abstraction is a generative starting point for the work. Vander Veen transforms these images through layers of physical material: wood, plaster, fiberglass, and hardware, along with layers of inlay, silkscreen printing, and painting.
Vander Veen is interested in the emotions that cross between human and object: empathy, disgust, and desire. His work beckons the viewer to draw close. What may read legibly with distance devolves and collapses into abstraction in close proximity, becoming something more visceral. The resulting works resist easy legibility, inviting viewers into an experience that is as much haptic as visual, concerned with distance, desire, and the emotional charge of the materials themselves.
