Unrequited Love Explores Artificial Substitutes for Genuine Connection
BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG for WEEKLY VOLCANO 5/15/26 |
Imagine you are a jellyfish, floating along in the current, when you come across an almost-mirror image, a white and floating creature flowing with the same pull of the underwater world that carries you through your life.
Perhaps you, the jellyfish, fall in love with this majestic stranger. But your love can never be. This exquisite creature is actually a discarded plastic grocery bag, and although it will never die, it can never return your feelings.
This particular narrative was the inspiration for local Tacoma artist Andrew Feuk’s series Unrequited Love, which depicts sea life interacting with the detritus left over from human consumption in oil on canvas.
The series is meant to bring up conversations around our relationship to the environment, love, permanence, beauty, and yes, littering, without lecturing the viewer.
The idea is to open a conversation with something beautiful that also makes people think, Feuk said.
As he has explored these topics through this series, parallels between these unrequited love stories and the current explosion of AI integration have been unavoidable.
“There are all these people interacting with this thing online that they get an emotional attachment to, that is just, you know, numbers, ones and zeros … it makes you think more of what your environment, just in general, is like,” Feuk said.
“You’re falling for something that’s not real” and “it’s becoming more and more of a problem as people interact with things that just want to please them … they just say what you want to hear,” Feuk said.
Feuk’s experience as a father has inspired much of his work in recent years and also gave him the opportunity to dedicate time to his art.
When he and his wife had children, they decided that he would be a stay-at-home dad. At first, there was not much time for art-making, but as his children have grown, this role has given him the time to utilize his artistic talent and education; he triple majored in painting, printmaking, and sculpture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
In this current series, seeing the world through his children’s eyes helped inspire both the subject of sea life and environmental issues.
When they encounter litter out in nature together, their family usually practices good stewardship by throwing it away.
At the same time, “the environment is changing, and it’s frustrating to not know what [the future] holds for my kids,” Feuk said.
While this train of thought is daunting and motivates him to make a statement with his art, experiencing the natural world with his kids has been “almost like a rediscovery” of the beauty and interesting details of sea life he has grown up around.
Sea life, in particular, has been a natural part of his life growing up in the Pacific Northwest, but exploring it with his kids has been “almost like a rediscovery,” Feuk said.
Whether that is at a place like Owen Beach or at the Point Defiance Zoo, “it’s just interesting to see through their eyes what they look like and what they like,” Feuk said.
Permanence and the lack thereof have been themes that Feuk has been exploring for years in a wide variety of media.
He has explored this through various mixed-media creations exploring the heavy weight and fleeting presence of printed newspapers in both metal and bark, stacked stones and metaphorical societal systems built with unstable sticks, transformed crayon scribbles, and linoleum block prints.
This theme has been especially prescient in his experience of being a father: both the permanent importance of the early years and the way a moment is meant to be experienced, then gone forever.
In one series, he played with this idea through reductive wood engraving prints.
These start with carving images in a wood block, making a print of a single color, then carving away some of that block to create the next image for stamping in a different color, then repeating that process.
While the carving into the wood block is permanent, the process is destructive as well. “Once I start, I can’t go back and do another run, so it has this preciousness to it,” Feuk said.
Unrequited Love Art Exhibit
Showing now through June 21st 2026.
Tacoma Little Theatre., 210 N I Street, Tacoma, WA.
