I make paintings, photography and video and artists’ books. The oil paintings are on metal and they are gestures that rearrange the landscape as a result of a changing climate. The most current works are part of a series called “The Grand Tour” in which the same hand that loves a place damages it. I want to implicate the very things that i desire.The depth of loss appears in a tarnished mirror.
The photography and videos wrestle with adaptation in disaster, and have occupied an arena of irony, empathy,and loss. I look at the heart of Western idealism in nature and tinker with it. The images we expect to see forever are disrupted. Music and dance play a critical role in the videos, in that their cultural iconography are important tools. Public Celebration and sport are becoming more urgent in these works. Over the past four years I am involved with making multi-media public art works that are collaborations with actors and composers, and dancers. Recently, the films are interacting with live performances with musicians, and recitation of text.
The photography selects and submerges American icons of nature, seminal works of art history, and particular environmental landscapes that are fertile for social import. How can I altar meaning with a sublime gesture that is at once ironic. I am interacting with science, performing hydrodynamic experiments in tanks, creeks, rivers, oceans, and various other bodies of water. Sometimes I stage the photographs both as a puppet master and a director, other times I use underwater equipment to record water light, and animal and human phenomena as it interacts with the camera. I use a tapestry of sound elements as a tool of commentary.
Currently, I am making a work: Men and Women in Water Cities. This work is in progress, and involves actors, and filming people in predicaments underwater. The work is inspired by Robert Longo’s paintings: Men in Cities, but takes off in unexpected directions. The most recent chapter, Water City: Berkeley, is completed as of 2014 and is making the international rounds of film festivals. Also this fall 2014, marks the completion of “The Albertine Work Out" an artists book by Anne Carson and myself.The book's images are highlights of a gender transposition theory mainly by the images of cuts and folds.
Kim Anno
2014