Artist: Andy Schumacher
Exhibition title: Sack of Potatoes
Venue: Main Street, Toronto, Canada
Date: August 25 – September 29, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Main Street, Toronto
A good painter is always a little bit stupid. I am a little bit stupid, but this is not a painting. It’s a misunderstanding. I don’t understand a lot of things. I do what I have to do, I do what I’m told to do. I used to tell people what to do, not anymore, I need to get healed, then I can tell my stupid friends what to do. And I have only a confused understanding of what I’m being healed from and how I came to be here. Someone told me what to do, I heard a voice, telling me to get back to a city, what city? And to a hospital. And that’s why I was running, I was told to run. My boots stepping down hard on the dry trampled grass of the migratory landscape. So little moisture and a mouth so thirsty I stumbled over a rock and fell down with my face landing beside another rock. I lifted over the rock and there was some moisture underneath. And living in the moisture was a salamander. A moist red-backed salamander, a small woodland salamander inhabiting wooded slopes as far north in Canada as southern Quebec and the maritime provinces. But I wasn’t in Southern Quebec, I was in northern Quebec or maybe northern Europe. Far north, but not in the woods, only grass and rocks. No water, only some moisture under the rocks. And my tongue became moist because I ate the salamander. And I ate it because I was hungry, a hunger that came on from moving quickly. Because I thought I was being chased. Chased by the ones who betrayed me. I have a lot of betrayers. They were all closing in on me. A lot of things can close in on you. Even a tree, even a bookshelf. I am a tree and I am a bookshelf. A bookshelf made of trees made of myself closing in on me. All of the books, all of my books closing in on me, destroying my mind with their minds, killing me. I must not read the books. Put them back on the shelf. Put myself back on the shelf. I can’t think about myself anymore…
-Andy Schumacher, excerpt from Sack of Potatoes
Andy Schumacher (born Kitchener, Canada) is an artist based in Vienna, Austria. The exhibition Sack of Potatoes coincides with the launch of his eponymously titled fiction text. Schumacher’s peers Ina Ebenberger, Victor Lizana, Sigrid Mau,Aidan Pontarini, Emmanuel Troy and Dan Vogt, were invited by the artist to contribute illustrations for the text that were incorporated into the exhibition.
