Ann C, that's me!

My work aims to access all of the senses through the visual.  Through the use of specific textures, colors, and line quality I explore my own experiences while attempting to reenact those experiences that others can relate to.  I want the reader to feel a visceral response to the seemingly tactile style of my work.

        When selecting a theme for a piece, I usually return to memories I have really embodied because they feel honest.  Once I have a theme, I choose the materials that best express the idea.  For some reason very specific but mundane memories from the everyday can stick the most.  To create the images in my work, I draw directly from these experiences. For example, the floral and linen textures of the bedspread in Wet Dream were pulled directly from the memory of the pattern of my bedspread in the dream.

The piece Jerry’s Super Market reflects the overwhelming sensory experience of being in a supermarket.  I attempt to replicate the almost nauseating experience of intense colors, patterns, textures, and smells within the maze of products.  From prior work, I used the textures from photographs of grocery aisles combined with drawn images to ensure that specific textures of water bottles, cardboard boxes, and hot sauce containers would instantly grab the viewer’s senses.

Recently, I have been interested in exploring narrative forms.  In The Medium is the Massage, McLahun writes,

“The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms-particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform,

c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s

and

c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.

The line, the continuum”(44).  Relating this to my own work, I am interested in how traditional book forms create narrative as compared to non-traditional forms.  While Wet Dreams follows a traditional book format, Jerry’s SuperMarket has no linear order. There is not a timeline in which the audience consumes information in a specific order, but instead explores the interior of the supermarket on their own time and order.  However, Wet Dreams is not presented as a traditional book format on this blog.  Images of the scanned pages present themselves in chronological order in blocked sections.  This demonstrates narrative reflects the  “technology of the alphabet”. I think the format of the piece affects the experience of the viewer. McLuhan explains as “the fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts--”specialism”--reflected the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process” (45). McLuhan also discusses the interaction between the audience and the medium with traditional book form and how the printed and portable book “added much to the new cult of individualism” and allowed men can read in isolation and privacy (50).