The Gallery Reception is September 17th 1-3pm.
In 2017, Anna Garner witnessed a fall from a shifting boulder in the Southern California desert. The experience sparked her curiosity about the volatility of a form normally assumed as being stable. A large rock that was mistaken as steady, despite its mass and solidity, despite its stationary appearance, was moved by the imbalance caused by the weight of a human body. As it self-corrected and changed its position, the boulder displaced itself and ultimately altered its material soundness. Garner took the incident into her studio and began dissecting it philosophically. She gradually began interpreting it as a metaphor for the photographic image and how its documentary status often fails to match objective reality. She aligned this with misplaced concreteness, a concept first posed by the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. It occurs when abstract ideas are mistaken for concrete realities, or when objects are contextualized without correlation to spatial or temporal relationships. This ultimately leads to a misunderstanding of the nature of reality, proving that vision is not a reliable source for understanding the real.
In Misplacing the concrete, Garner combines linear and non-illusionistic photographs with sculptural works to investigate stability of verticality, the fixed photographic viewpoint, and the body’s containment within and by geometric forms that seek to further destabilize scenes of imbalance.
Anna Berenice Garner is an artist working in performance, sculpture, photography, and video and is based in México City. One person exhibitions of her work have been presented at Lateral, México City, México (2024); Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY (2022); and ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2019). Anna’s work has been included in thematic exhibitions Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2021), Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp, Belgium (2019); The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2019); and Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2016). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2016), and Art OMI (2019). Her work is held in the collections of The San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, CA), The Federal Reserve Board (Washington DC), The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX), and The National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC).
This exhibition is on display August 13- October 10.
