Anna Garner’s practice includes, video, performance, and sculpture. Her multi-genre work creates focused disruptions of control that rework perceptions of strength and risk. Anna’s work has been supported through a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum and participation as an artist-in-residence at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: The Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), Novo Artspace (Cologne, Germany), Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA).
My studio practice is framed by a foundation in lens-based media, blending performance and sculpture with video and still photography. Through staged interactions with other performers or with sculptural structures I create work that stretches the capacity of my body while examining ideals of control and strength.
In video performances I pull visual cues from slapstick maneuvers, stunt work, and cartoon logic; I perform premeditated falls referencing the rehearsed yet precarious slips in physical comedy. As both the director and target of the mishaps, I attempt to control my own demise, creating visual contrast between probabilities of security and calamity.
In photographs I lift and mobilize symbolic figures that are literally or metaphorically twice my size. Bearing the weight of a body builder or large mountain sculptures with my shoulders, back, and arms the staged performances deal with mass, strength, and the status of the underdog. The repeated exercises require careful balance, not only through correct lifting techniques that offset weight differences, but also between polarities of power and vulnerability, intimacy and distance, masculine and feminine. The resulting images combine the mythology of figures like Samson, the feats of strong man competitions, and the reciprocal exchange of the ballet pas de deux to express the multi-layered sides to physical power and intimacy.