Publication date: 02/06/2003
Pop life
BY ANNE CRUMP
Name: Ulrika Andersson
Age: 29
Neighborhood: Tenderloin
Ulrika
Andersson grew up in Sweden and came to the United States at age 20 to attend
the San Francisco Art Institute. After earning her BFA in 1998, she enrolled in
the master's program at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she
graduated in 2000. Currently, she works as an exhibit developer at the
Exploratorium. You can see more of her work in a San Francisco Arts Commission
show "Power and Affection" opening May 23 (call 415-554-6080 or visit www.sfacgallery.org for information).
Getting
started
Ulrika Andersson
describes her foray into visual arts a "big leap of faith." That's
because when she decided to apply to the undergraduate program at the San
Francisco Art Institute, she had virtually no arts experience. In Sweden, she
was a student at a specialized science high school. But she also was "a
pop music fanatic," which prompted a couple of small creative projects, making
her own versions of album covers and T-shirts for her favorite bands. "I
had this love of pop music, and I had the idea that I could do something
creative related to it," she explains.
At the Art
Institute, she delved into painting ("I wanted to be good at something; I
felt like I had something to prove"), but when she got to CCAC -- and
especially once she got an internship at the Exploratorium -- she began to
embrace multimedia. More specifically, she began to embrace media and
techniques she wasn't good at. "I sucked at multimedia, but it was good
for me. I became more interested in the idea than the medium, and I was not as
worried about being polished," she says. "And it was a lot more
fun."
On
ideas
Andersson sees making art as a way to be an active fan of
pop cultural phenomena. "I go after one aspect at a time -- before it was
sci-fi, now it's music, next it's horror films. There's so much out there, and
it's so interesting to me to see how it affects me and what my place is in
it," she says. "I want to be part of it."
Game
time
She explored the
sci-fi aspect by creating a video game, called "To This Day What I
Remember Most Clearly Is the Movie." It was inspired both by an
exploration video game she got hooked on, "Myst," and by the idea of
a movie being just one component of its own pop culture package, which includes
merchandise, photos of and interviews with the actors, and a whole lot of
advance hype.
By
the time a Hollywood movie hits theaters, she notes, it's already is like a
legend -- we know who stars in it, we've seen promotional images, we've heard
something about the story. In her game, however, players are given the task of
figuring out how to complete a journey, in order to see how the story ends. "I like the idea of interacting with a movie and setting your own
pace."
Merry
melodies
For
"Power and Affection," the upcoming Arts Commission project,
Andersson took her cue from pop music. She was especially interested in how pop
songs so clearly and effectively express emotions like romantic love, while
people generally struggle to convey these emotions in conversation, and even in
art, because they sound sappy. She decided to take snippets of her friends'
conversations related to friendship and love and give them the pop music
treatment -- reprinting phrases on T-shirts and posters. "It's the
ultimate lowbrow poetry," she says. And it lets her participate in one
aspect of pop music creation.
We
all scream
Now Andersson's
beginning to shift her focus to horror films, particularly those by Italian
horror master Dario Argento. "I used to be too scared to watch them,"
she concedes, "but I like that they're this really expressive, popular
thing that speaks to people. They're inclusive, and they're done in good fun. I
like working that way, "But like albums and video games, commercial movies
are expensive endeavors, which makes direct participation in them out of her
reach. "I want to participate in it. I want to be an active fan," she
says. "The low-budget way is to make art."