SUA Faculty Scholarship: Pearce, Anne Austin

River Deep–Mountain High at Founders Gallery at Soka University, Aliso Viejo

Anne absorbs the energy of her surroundings and experiences, both immediate and ancestral, and translates them into intense and color rich abstractions that capture life’s beauty, absurdity, tests, and revelations. Embellished with collaged elements of paintings created over years of her travels, the work contains multitudes and retells the stories of life’s complicated layers and the bittersweet joy of its journey.

“My work illustrates those moments for which there is no distinct emotional adjective to employ – ambiguous moments that occur exclusively in one’s head or often between two people at an intersection of communication. It happens when we are grappling with a dream deferred or an expectation not met. It is the time passed shifting sensibilities, wavering between resolution and avoidance, teetering at the threshold of debilitating anxiety or liberating submission, deciding what, when and how to speak, what to distill, and whether to scream.”

As human beings we live in/on earth, in habitats, in homes, within communities and workplaces. We find comfort and, over time, grow into various states of togetherness or oneness passing days, months, and years with each other. The act of cutting apart, and the eventuality of change potentially encapsulate a full spectrum of human emotion. The resulting effect propels one down any number of potentially unknown paths.
When my feet pad across the earth and stones, I imagine all those living things – plant and animal alike – that once lived and are now buried beneath my feet. I can feel the telltale hearts of wooly mammoths, smell the green, fresh ferns, and hear the yet-to-be discovered hearts of the long dead beat again in me. I have been fortunate to travel on planet earth and spend as much time admiring, observing, smelling, feeling, and caring for her as was possible. It seems that nature never seems to fail any large appetite for consuming its natural, visual delights and it seems that human appetites never seem to diminish in their desire to own/possess it.

Catalog for Anne Austin Pearce solo exhibition "Midwestern Green/ Western Green"

This exhibition features two artists—Joiri Minaya of New York and Anne Austin Pearce of California—whose works question the colonial urges and histories around collecting, controlling and owning nature. Minaya’s ongoing Containers, a series of performative photographs, feature the artist in seemingly natural environments wearing bodysuits she makes out of fabric with designs that represent tropical nature. Minaya’s work often utilizes ‘the tropical’ as a critique of colonialism and as a means to locate and reclaim agency. Pearce’s small sculptures exist somewhere between decorative glass vessels and emollient blob. As if the after-effects of an oil spill, dozens of these art objects suggest humanity’s endless suffocation and consumption of nature through containment.
Together, these two bodies of work engage questions surrounding ethics and aesthetics of contemporary ecology, as well as the assumed vessel that is humanity. The artists ultimately ask: What is consumed or preserved and under whose authority?