Anne Austin Pearce: Path

ANNE AUSTIN PEARCE PATH SHERRY LEEDY CONTEMPORARY ART

SHERRY LEEDY CONTEMPORARY ART 2004 Baltimore Ave. Kansas City, MO 64108 816.221.2626 sherryleedy.com Cover image Path: Honeyed Beach Catalog design Allison King Photo credit E.G. Schempf

ANNE AUSTIN PEARCE:PATH June 4 - August 22, 2020

Anne Austin Peace: Path Artist Statement

Path is a series of paintings conceptually and physically grounded in the act of cutting apart and the evolution that process produces.

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 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 have spent as much time admiring, observing, smelling, feeling and caring for her as was possible.

It seems that nature never fails to satisfy any large appetite that wants to consume its natural, visual delights and that human appetites never diminish in their desire to own and possess it.

After my many travels, I now find myself relocated for the first time in twenty-five years, having left my home in Kansas and landing in California. Travel now seems both excessive and destructive to all living beings.

There are nine works included in the series titled Path, which began as one large work and eventually became nine interrelated works. Conceptually conceived in Kansas, physically begun in Wyoming and finally completed in California, these 42”x42” paintings are ink, acrylic and collage on paper.

The collaged elements in these paintings are actually drawings that were made in multiple locations around the world. Each collage is tethered by place with a specific visual language tying it to that location. As a human is transformed by each new experience, so are the small paintings made at unique geographical locations. They are now intermingled and representative of specific moments in time and space, interwoven and contextualized, now belonging to these new works.

ANNE AUSTIN PEARCE P A T H

By Elisabeth Kirsch If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

- Nicola Tesla Pulsating threads, amoeba- like pods, rainbow pools of color, and surging tentacles swim freely in Anne Austin Pearce’s latest artworks, all in a three-dimensional flux, triggering varying states of consciousness in any who care to see and feel.

“I have an unmediated brain,” Pearce acknowledges; “I’m one hundred percent porous. And I make art every day no matter what. This work is about my geographical and psychic experiences through time.”

Pearce’s abstract, mixed media artworks in Path are hence diaristic, reflecting her long-time fascination with themes of evolution and regeneration. The nine works in this exhibit are cut from one massive roll of paper Pearce painted and drew on the last year and a half as she moved from Wyoming to Kansas City and finally, California. On top of these works, Pearce then cut, spliced and collaged segments from various works of art she had made over the last decade, a “deliberate recycling process” uniting her art and life.

Pearce’s art has always reflected her peregrinations to numerous sites on the planet, but now she has merged her personal time frame with particular insights re the earth’s billion plus years of existence.

The branches, veins and layers of strata in her art reference not only the physical steps she has taken over the years, but the psychic, lidar- like connections she makes “to everything that has lived or died.”

There are noteworthy differences between Pearce’s earlier art, known for its sensuous, flowing beauty, and the works in Path, which fearlessly explore the shadow side. Because her layered collages are formed from different color palettes and mixed styles of mark- making, they have the same impact as aerial views of landscape or cross section cuts through the earth, while also denoting the deepest of interior landscapes, both biological and emotional.

Sea Beds Dried and First plunged in Firefly are two of several works that visually reference water, and that are also oceanic in feeling. As with all the works in Path, the sublime and the toxic co-exist, equal parts metaphor for both ecological, and sentient states of being. Whales could sequester in First Plunged in Firefly, and fossilized marine life – or is it toxic oil spills? - might inhabit Sea Beds Dried.

Both works could also refer to psychological states that are meditative or despairing.

Does Words Resting in Guts denote swallowed emotions or lethal wastelands? Well Worth Waiting could signify orange poppies in all their glory, noxious fires consuming oilfields, or a state of celebratory well-being. Watson’s Fire and Funeral, with its venomous dark coils, is both seductive and scary; it is ominous, while its patches of glowing indigo hint at the possibility of phoenix rising in the form of clean waters and clear skies.

Cosmic in nature, the works in Path evoke a sense of timelessness at once environmental and spiritual; they also allude to the possibilities of destruction and/or rebirth.

One of Pearce’s favorite books is Micromegas, Voltaire’s seminal 1752 work of science fiction in which two giant aliens from Sirius and Saturn travel the universe together and visit the planet Earth. The humans are indescribably tiny to the giants, but they converse with them anyway, finding them somewhat intelligent and learned. That is, until they learn that humans subscribe to Aquinas’ theory that the universe was made solely for them; at that point the aliens fall over laughing, realizing that Earth’s inhabitants refuse to acknowledge their smallness in the scope of life. Which is one of the points of Path.

Compassion is embodied, nonetheless, in Pearce’s oeuvre. It allows us to understand that past, present and future realities are malleable. We can choose transcendence or remain unconscious; both are both distinct options.

Path: Watson’s Fire and Funeral 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Ancients Under Foot 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Hanged Shafts of Light 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Words Resting in Guts 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Well Worth Waiting 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Sea Beds Dried 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Black, Wet, Stones 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Honeyed Beach 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

Path: Fist Plunged in Firefly 2020 Acrylic, inks, collage on paper 44” x 44”

The Path

By Yxta Maya Murray For Anne Austin Pearce

She walks to her studio. She’ll paint there. She’ll write.

She takes the long path.

There is no other path.

It’s an old road. Many women have traveled it.

Still, she’s alone as she makes her way.

It’s an ancient passage. Once there was an ocean here. Whales swam in it.

Lobsters crawled on this ground. Lichen, sea-coral, greenweed, kelp, and red algae floated above.

Now there are woods and birds. She sifts through the shadows as she moves forward. She sees the redbud and the tangerine flower.

The world collects in a violent way upon the lime leaf of the sapling.

The orchid is the color of veins and pale hands grasping.

No one will protect her in this place.

She loves it so much she wishes she didn’t have to die.

It’s hard to make art.

It’s impossible to make art.

In dread she walks the path to the studio where she must wrench her thoughts onto the paper. The tangerine and ink-spill of the flower are untranslatable until an accident occurs, or many hours of furious and insane labor have passed.

No one wants you, and no one cares, she hears someone murmuring in the bushes.

But when she looks under the daisy, she sees herself crouching there, talking garbage.

On this path there reigns a refreshing and total uncaring.

She can do what she wants.

She can do what she wants with the indigo spider that becomes something else.

The dark creature shifts into a blue-spotted palm, which is threaded by pink crystals and harnessed by ebony thumbprints and a flexing of grisaille.

She decides where to place the yellow.

She knows that yellow is better than buttercup or canary, here.

A breeze blows through the world.

The making lifts her up so that she joins the flourishing of the trees.

On the path, sadness turns green, like tree moss.

When she gets to the studio it could all turn into ash, which will go into the painting or the poem.

It all goes into the painting or the poem: She decants youth, love, sickness, death, work, disappointment, and questions about how to live upon the worktable.

At the age of fifty years old, a woman artist becomes a monster.

She rises from the salt with the timeless fish who once ruled this forest.

It’s taken a full life to finally make this mark with the charcoal.

A whole life to make the mark.

She opens the door.

O’Keefe, Morrison, Gentileschi, Woolf, Morisot.

Anguissola, Rosa Rolanda, Mickalene Thomas, Lee Krasner.

Hurston, Sappho, de Beauvoir, Austen, Chopin, Butler, Dickinson.

Mitchell, Delaunay, Carrington, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Art made you happy, right?

The gods are silent in this garden as she treads the fossils and plucks a piece of bark, noticing the pattern on it.

She introduces the data into the brightness of her mind and does not know what will become of it.

Yxta Maya Murray Bio Yxta Maya Murray is a novelist, art critic, playwright, and law professor. The author of nine books, her most recent are the forthcoming story collection, The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could (University of Nevada Press, 2020), and the novel, Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021).

She has won a Whiting Award, an Art Writer’s Grant, and has been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, California.

ANNE AUSTIN PEARCE www.anneaustinpearce.com anneaustinpearce@gmail.com EDUCATION 1995 1990 1988-89 1986-88

Master of Fine Arts, Painting and Drawing, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Printmaking, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS Study abroad program, Brighton Polytechnic, Brighton, UK Foundations and Printmaking, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS 2019 Associate Professor of Studio Art, Soka University, Alisa Viejo, CA 2013-18 Tenured Associate Professor of Art, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO 2003-18 Director, Greenlease Gallery of Art & Van Ackeren Permanent Collection; Curator of Contemporary Exhibition Series, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO 2006-12 Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO 1999-06 Adjunct Faculty, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO. SELECTED RESIDENCIES 2019 2018 2015

2014 2013

Artist-in-Residence, UCROSS Foundation, Clearmont, WY Artist-in-Residence, Officina Stamperia Del Notaio International Printmaking Residency, Tusa, Sicily Artist-in-Residence, Rimbun Dahan international residency program, Selangor, Malaysia Artist-in-Residence, Draw International, Caylus, France Visiting Artist Project/Performance, Micro- Myth Confessions of Rights not Wrongs in collaboration with Ladd Brothers Chapel exhibition, Invisible Dog, Brooklyn Artist-in-Residence, pARTage international social practice residency, Flic-en-Flac, Mauritius Artist-in-Residence, Akumal International Artists Residency, Akumal, Mexico Artist-in-Residence, UCROSS Foundation, Clearmont, WY

AWARDS/GRANTS 2015

Lighton International Artists Exchange Program Grant, Lighton Foundation, Kansas City, MO. To support travel and research Presidential Grant, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO.

2012

Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award, Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, MO. Unrestricted cash award recognizing outstanding accomplishment and promise.

2011

Presidential Grant, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO. To support research and “Double Portraits� exhibition at Kansas City Public Library and Betrand Delcroix Gallery, NY, NY.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018 2017

2016 2016 2015 2015 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007

2005 2003 2002 2000 1998

Barnacled Midriff, Mingenback Gallery, curated by Nelson Smith, Bethany College, Linsborg, KS Everything is Going to be Alright, Bradbury Museum, curated by Les Christinsen, Jonesboro, AK Leaving Alone, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by director Tom Piche, Sedalia, MO Geographies, Entrails, Empathies, Rowe Galleries, Charlotte, NC Four by Four Midwest Invitational, Springfield Art Museum, curated by Sarah Buhr, Springfield, MO This is How I Feel When I Think About You, Sherry Leedy Contemporary, Kansas City, MO Macro Myth #1, Window Installation/performance, Caylus, France Animals Don’t Take Vows, Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Awards, H&R Block Artspace, curated by Rachel Smith, Kansas City, MO Undertow, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Passport, Genevieve Guldner Gallery, Kansas City Central Public Library, curated by Sean Kelly and Adam Gephardt, Kansas City, MO Double Personal: Works On Paper, Eppink Gallery, Emporia State University, Emporia, KS Works on Paper, PEO Art Gallery, Haidee & Allen Wild Center for the Arts, Cottey College, Nevada, MO Excerpts: Saucy Series, Gallery of Art and Design, University of Central Missouri, curated by Jeremy Mikolajczak, Warrensburg, MO Humours, Unit 5 Gallery, Kansas City, MO Rhetorical Black Holes, International Listening Conference, Frankfort, Germany Top to Bottom: Genetic Confetti, 1912 Gallery, Emory & Henry College, curated by Charles Goolsby, Emory, VA Wound Up Unwound, Lewis Art Gallery, Millsaps College, Jackson, MS New Work: From the Saucy Series, Sleuth Gallery, West Virginia Wesleyan University, Buckhannon, WV The Usefulness of Beasts, MoMO Studio, Kansas City, MO Head, MoMO Studio, Kansas City, MO New Work, Greenlease Gallery of Art, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO New Work, Parallel, Kansas City, MO New Work, Gallery Ten, Rockford, IL Pictures at an Exhibition, Gould Evans Goodman Gallery, Kansas City, MO

SELECTED TWO PERSON/GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018

A Periodic Table: Imagined Spaces, Carter Art Center, curated by Marcus Cain in conjunction

with “Open Spaces” curated by Dan Cameron, Kansas City, MO

In/Sight, Sherry Leedy Contemporary, Kansas City, MO

Kansas City Flatfile, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO

2017

2016 2015

2013 2012 2011 2010

2009

2008 2008

2007

2006 2005

A Surrender against Reality, UMKC Gallery of Art, University of Missouri, Kansas City, curated

by Davin Watne The Kansas City Collection, multiple venues, organized by Brian Hearn, Kansas City, MO Overneath, Northern Southern, curated by Rachel Freeman, Austin TX Never Ending Things, The New Gallery of Modern Art, Charlotte, NC Four by Four: Midwest Invitational, Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO Body-Mind Entente, UMKC Gallery of Art, curated by Davin Watne, Kansas City, MO Micro Myths: Confessions of Rights Not Wrongs, Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, NY Axis Mundi, Providence College Galleries, curated by Jamilee Polson Lacy, Providence, RI Elaborate Webs/Striking Exploits: Anne Austin Pearce & Sara Stites, MDC Museum of Art + Design, Miami Dade College, Miami, FL Group Show, Bertrand Delacroix Gallery, Manhattan, NY The Voice that Reaches You IV, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary, curated by Cara Megan Lewis, Kansas City, MO Obstacle, The Invisible Dog Gallery, curated by Steven and William Ladd, Brooklyn, NY re:FORM Los Angeles, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Selections from the Kansas City Collection, Cocoon Gallery, Kansas City, MO Body Image, Corcoran School of Art & Design, Washington, DC Kansas City Flatfile, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO Black & Blue: Kansas City's Grit & Grace, University Art Gallery, The University of South Dakota, curated by Michael Schonhoff, Vermillion, SD NEXT Art Fair, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary, Chicago, IL Verge Art Fair, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary, Miami, FL Drawing a Line, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary, curated by Cara Megan Lewis, Kansas City, MO KC in LA, Milo Gallery, curated Ashley McLean Emmenegger, Los Angeles, CA Kansas City Flatfile, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO Locate/Navigate, Charlotte Street Foundation La Esquina gallery, curated by Kate Hackman, Kansas City, MO The Palpable Instinct: Contemporary Artists Embrace Their Inner Child, Kansas City Art Institute Corporate Partners Exhibition, curated by Marcus Cain, Kansas City, MO 50th Annual Delta Exhibition, Townsend Wolf Gallery, Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR Patterns of Behavior, Unit 5 Gallery, Kansas City, MO Paper Dolls, Pulp / Paper & Art, Omaha, NE Art Now Miami Beach, Sherry Leedy Gallery, Kansas City, MO In Tandem: Collaborative Works by Anne Pearce & Marcus Cain, Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom, Overland Park, KS Slop, Swap, Shop, Project Space, Urban Culture Project, Kansas City, MO Truck: Kansas City/St. Louis Exchange Exhibition, White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO Valentine Show, The Late Show Gallery, Kansas City, MO Art against Aids, Illinois Institute of Art Gallery 180, Chicago, IL Group Show, Beth Allison Gallery, Kansas City, MO Group Show, The Farm, Kansas City, MO Critics Select, The Shore Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Longbranch, NJ Kansas City Flatfile, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, MO

2003 2002 2001 1998

Tetanus, Fahrenheit Gallery, curated by Eric Grimes, Kansas City, MO Bend: An Exhibition of New Paintings by Debra Di Blasi and Anne Austin Pearce, The Late Show Gallery, Kansas City, MO Field Codes: Pattern and Content, Kansas City Art Institute Corporate Exchange Exhibition, Kansas City, MO Volume!Volume!Volume! MoMO Studio, Kansas City, MO Winter Invitational, Telephonebooth, curated by Tim Brown, Kansas City, MO Frozen Treats, MoMO Gallery, Kansas City, MO The Stray Show, Kingsbury Place, Chicago Dolls and Monsters: Anne Pearce and Davora M. Lindner, MoMO Gallery, Kansas City, MO Girls Behaving Badly, The Late Show Gallery, Kansas City, MO Art Faculty Exhibition, Greenlease Gallery, Kansas City, MO Heartburn, The Late Show Gallery, Kansas City, MO Toe Five, Pedestrian Gallery, Jacksonville, FL Great Inspirations: Small Images, St. Louis Artists’ Guild, St. Louis, MO The Divine Comedy: Images of Heaven, Hell, and Limbo, Ann Arundel Community College, Arnold, MD

ARTIST TALKS AND PRESENTATIONS 2018 2017 2016 2013 2012 2011 2010 2008 2007 2005

Bethany College, Linsbourg KS Providence College Galleries, Providence College, Providence, RI Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO MDC Museum of Art + Design, Miami Dade College, Miami, FL Charlotte Street Foundation/Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO Genevieve Guldner Gallery, Kansas City, MO Emporia State University, Emporia, KS Fort Hays State University, Hays, KS University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO Emory and Henry College, Emory, VA International Listening Conference, Frankfort, Germany Millsaps College, Jackson, MS University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS West Virginia Wesleyan University, Buckhannon, WV

SELECTED COLLECTIONS Cerner Corporation, Kansas City, MO Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College, Miami, FL Rockhurst University (mural commissioned for Maybee Chapel), Kansas City, MO Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO Rimbun Dahan Arts Center, Malaysia

SHERRY LEEDY CONTEMPORARY ART 2004 Baltimore Ave. Kansas City, MO 64108 816.221.2626 sherryleedy.com