Working in a diverse array of media, Andro Wekua has developed a visual language grounded in the exploration of human experience through the subtle intersections of individual and pooled memory, personal identity, and history. Drawing on genres such as fantasy, science-fiction, and horror, Wekua creates fantastical and often macabre tableaux, revealing the complex processes of reconstruction and fragmentation that continually inform the personal, social, and fictive experience of remembrance.

Wekua was born in Sukhumi, Georgia, and much of the artist’s work explores notions of memory: personal, collective, and psychological. Creating pictorial representations of the past to better comprehend and grapple with the present, Wekua meditates on the tenuous boundary between historical reality and the artificial construct of remembering, pointing to the inescapable fact that the past is always distorted by the subjectivity of memory.

The book features the text “Sebastapolis (Interview with A.)” by cultural critic and science-fiction writer Mark von Schlegell. Images of new works from the artist’s 2012 exhibition at Gladstone Gallery include large colorful abstractions, as well as Wekua’s signature collages and portraits.