"Transmutation" Painting

Anna Crow (°1973, Windsor, Canada) is an artist who mainly works with painting. By choosing mainly formal solutions, Crow tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations. Her paintings are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. Through a radically singular approach that is nevertheless inscribed in the contemporary debate, she uses references and ideas that are so integrated into the process of the composition of the work that they may escape those who do not take the time to explore how and why these images haunt you, like a good film, long after you’ve seen them. Her works are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role. By discluding the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, her works references the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system. Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By taking daily life as subject matter, she masterfully creates by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer round and round in circles. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. Her works are thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism – made present most palpably in the artist’s exploration of some of the most hallowed of modernist paradigms. Anna Crow currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC.