On Campus at the Taber!
Cosmology of the Body:
Paintings and Drawings by
Anna Bayles Arthur
Making art in this historical moment:
Within the context of a global pandemic, state-sponsored terror, climate catastrophe, corporate coup's, and the looming spectacle of mass destruction, I am perpetually questioning the utility of art. We live in a media-saturated culture, are daily bombarded by images, sounds, symbols, and stories. Yet somehow, this ancient drive to create remains, the impulse to channel whatever it is, and to reveal it to the world. Just as our ancestors documented their humanity on the walls of a cave, so we continue, despite these looming questions, to manifest something where once there was nothing. This reckoning for the artist is life-long and can only be accomplished, I think, by the perpetual embrace of mystery. Within this reckoning and this embrace, I have found not so much a rational explanation for my pursuit as an artist, but rather a new faith in the calling. And given the alarming historical context within which I am called as an artist, I can only define this work as the thing in my life that most approximates prayer.
About the work:
From the time that my tiny hand could grip a cheap, #2 pencil, I have been compelled to the blank page. Pieces of cardboard from a discarded package, the back side of the old, green and white striped computer paper, all of it held so much allure. The blank page was full of possibility, a window through which the child could invent her world.
Through a lifetime practice of image-making, a unique visual vocabulary has developed. The process has always been highly intuitive, a playful tug between figure and ground. Layers of transparent pigments become the atmosphere through which forms float or sit, emerge or disintegrate. There is an explicit organicism that is both familiar and unfamiliar: biology, landscape, things mechanical, parts of composite bodies. These constructed relationships reveal narratives that echo the drama of our human experience and the intricate movements of the natural world. Each painting is a glimpse into a contained world, a microcosmic surrogate for all of the mystery that is a body, a system, an environment.
Through a meditative process of delving within, the paintings become landscapes of memory, dream, and invention – a manifestation of all that this body contains: primordial ocean worlds, utilitarian objects, symbols of our hands' work: chairs, tables, architecture; suggestions of all manner of biological movements, the ceaseless horizon, the depths of the human eye. I go back for the child with her tiny hands and fascination with fantasy, terror, things beautiful and other-worldly. Grief and longing can likely be found in each painting, as well as the inescapable tug of one's own mortality. How does it all relate? Where do all of these things exist within us; how might we chose to access them? Are there points of intersection within our individual bodies and between us, both as a species and as an interconnected part of the living pulse of the planet? It is here that an intimation of the meaning in this image-making ritual is revealed. All that came before, each isolated event that built us, continues to move within, rippling into the now and the yet-to-come.
Gallery note:
Though we encourage you to experience this exhibition live, Anna's work may be viewed on line at:
