ann_porter@hotmail.com
Bio
Ann Porter is a contemporary artist who works in a variety of materials, including painted and fired stained glass, video monitors, altered video stills and cast polychrome sculpture. Most recently she has been working with Photoshopped images in one series and wrapped, cast paper in another. In the recent past she has made both charcoal drawings of stuffed toys as well as large mixed media constructions. Each series explores the complications involved in the communication between human beings, the natural and supernatural world.
Now based in Sandpoint, Idaho, Porter is Professor Emeritus from Black Hills State University. She began teaching at BHSU in the fall of 2003. She has taught a broad range of classes, from Art History to Sculpture to Drawing to Art and Technology.
Porter earned her BA at Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1975, and her MFA in sculpture at Washington State University in 2002. She has also taught at North Idaho College, Washington State University and was a commercial art director and illustrator. She was a freelance designer in the areas of jewelry, printing, illustration, as well as screen-printing and embroidery. Her commercial clients included the Central Park Zoo, Yellowstone National Park, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Grand Old Opry, and the Lawrence Welk Show.
Over the years, Porter has had a number of solo exhibits and has also been involved in many juried and invitational shows, both regionally and nationally.
Passengers Statement
When we walk into an airport we cede a large part of our individual selves to become part of a larger social fabric. All expectations of privacy and autonomy give way to a system of shared movement: waiting together, walking together and watching together.
This collective mode of being is often perceived as somehow unnatural or forced, but as I watch people in airports, it occurs to me that our ephemeral unions are as much a part of who we are as our gloried moments of individual effort. The texture of this apparent paradox, of being simultaneously single and in a group, is what this work contemplates.
Meatheads Statement
It’s important to put a face on the violence done to our body politic, to our environment, to our fellow creatures. Ground, processed flesh becomes the background that informs the deeds of our very worst politicians. Uniformly presented, whether in business suits or Styrofoam trays, these people come to us sleekly packaged, in make-up or plastic.
In creating the appearance of processed and commodified flesh, this work aims to give a shape to a revulsion to which words and arguments per se cannot do justice. Just as the antiseptic, cleanly-wrapped parcels that appear so magically in our market obscure the industrialized horrific violence that are the conditions of their making, so too the blatherings of the subjects that these cast and painted meatheads represent spawn globalized unspeakable violence.
If you haven’t cooked ground meat in a while, you forget the stench.
Saints and Stuffies Statement
Lately I have been drawing plush toys in charcoal. I like the charcoal—its history begins when human image-making begins. It speaks of memory even if we don’t reference Paleolithic cave paintings. If we remember only as far back as smudgy black and white family photos, charcoal suggests the passage of time: it has weight, it has value, it has intimacy.
I like the toys as well. They are also the stuff of memory, the half-remembered crib fantasies, the childhood dramas. For many of us, they were the first experience with our fellow creatures—live or not, they were real.
And so I am circling back around to these early animal playthings, but this time with an adult sensibility. Oh sure, there’s the posthumanist theoretical overlay, the academic question of how we respond to our fellow creatures. That’s important and it’s in the work. But what I think I am really doing is making new special friends.
Ann Porter is a contemporary artist who works in a variety of materials, including painted and fired stained glass, video monitors, altered video stills and cast polychrome sculpture. Most recently she has been working with Photoshopped images in one series and wrapped, cast paper in another. In the recent past she has made both charcoal drawings of stuffed toys as well as large mixed media constructions. Each series explores the complications involved in the communication between human beings, the natural and supernatural world.
Now based in Sandpoint, Idaho, Porter is Professor Emeritus from Black Hills State University. She began teaching at BHSU in the fall of 2003. She has taught a broad range of classes, from Art History to Sculpture to Drawing to Art and Technology.
Porter earned her BA at Reed College in Portland Oregon in 1975, and her MFA in sculpture at Washington State University in 2002. She has also taught at North Idaho College, Washington State University and was a commercial art director and illustrator. She was a freelance designer in the areas of jewelry, printing, illustration, as well as screen-printing and embroidery. Her commercial clients included the Central Park Zoo, Yellowstone National Park, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Grand Old Opry, and the Lawrence Welk Show.
Over the years, Porter has had a number of solo exhibits and has also been involved in many juried and invitational shows, both regionally and nationally.
Passengers Statement
When we walk into an airport we cede a large part of our individual selves to become part of a larger social fabric. All expectations of privacy and autonomy give way to a system of shared movement: waiting together, walking together and watching together.
This collective mode of being is often perceived as somehow unnatural or forced, but as I watch people in airports, it occurs to me that our ephemeral unions are as much a part of who we are as our gloried moments of individual effort. The texture of this apparent paradox, of being simultaneously single and in a group, is what this work contemplates.
Meatheads Statement
It’s important to put a face on the violence done to our body politic, to our environment, to our fellow creatures. Ground, processed flesh becomes the background that informs the deeds of our very worst politicians. Uniformly presented, whether in business suits or Styrofoam trays, these people come to us sleekly packaged, in make-up or plastic.
In creating the appearance of processed and commodified flesh, this work aims to give a shape to a revulsion to which words and arguments per se cannot do justice. Just as the antiseptic, cleanly-wrapped parcels that appear so magically in our market obscure the industrialized horrific violence that are the conditions of their making, so too the blatherings of the subjects that these cast and painted meatheads represent spawn globalized unspeakable violence.
If you haven’t cooked ground meat in a while, you forget the stench.
Saints and Stuffies Statement
Lately I have been drawing plush toys in charcoal. I like the charcoal—its history begins when human image-making begins. It speaks of memory even if we don’t reference Paleolithic cave paintings. If we remember only as far back as smudgy black and white family photos, charcoal suggests the passage of time: it has weight, it has value, it has intimacy.
I like the toys as well. They are also the stuff of memory, the half-remembered crib fantasies, the childhood dramas. For many of us, they were the first experience with our fellow creatures—live or not, they were real.
And so I am circling back around to these early animal playthings, but this time with an adult sensibility. Oh sure, there’s the posthumanist theoretical overlay, the academic question of how we respond to our fellow creatures. That’s important and it’s in the work. But what I think I am really doing is making new special friends.