Weho, Los Angeles
Anna Garner
Two Views and One Fall
Ltd Los AngelesAnna Garner’s studio practice is grounded in lens-based media, blending performance and sculpture with video and still photography. Through staged interactions with other performers or with structures she creates, her practice stretches the capacity of her body to examine the ideals and illusions of control and strength. In her video performances, Just Below and Pratfall, she performs premeditated falls referencing the rehearsed yet precarious slips of physical comedy. She positions her body within a paradigm of contained and elective risk, undertaking a spectacle of physical discipline latent with failure. By staging these disasters, she attempts to control the parameters of the danger, yet this impossibility collapses through the unknown of when and how the structure will break. Set in an architectural frame that references the forms of Minimalist sculpture, the work questions the stability of such structures existing outside reality, emotion, or feeling. Inserting anxiety into such a space, it can no longer exist as neutral. Instead it captures an intimate self-portrait of a body in physical uncertainty, a fragile attempt at control. Through the series entitled Protecting Popo, the artist performs highly-staged photographs in which she carries a large human figure. Dealing with mass, strength, and the status of the underdog, she positions herself, 4’11”, 95 lb., as a formidable, yet doubtful, opponent against a 200 lb. professional bodybuilder. Working together, the two individuals mix illusion with physical strategy to construct a mutable embodiment of strength and reveal the multi-layered sides to power and intimacy. Evoking a range of symbols of strength including Atlas and his globe, Athena, “Strongest Man” competitions, and the pas de deux of traditional ballet, the work addresses how strength is visually represented, shifting the assumed power dynamics of these conceptions. Recent work in performance and sculpture has focused on the mythos and symbology of mountains. Viewed as a complex allegorical space that embodies both sublimity and physical adversity, the iconography of the mountain is utilized to address desires and histories for relating to the unknown. Considering the references and research of European colonial expeditions to chart and conquer summits, parodies the inability to fully know and illustrates the illusory qualities of knowing. It is these contradictions that her work considers, placing contemporary perceptions of physical adversity, challenge, and victory with long-standing mythologies of ascendancy, and the sublime. In these ways, recurring questions of control and perception, of what the body can control or conquer, are cast again in raking light. Anna Garner (b. 1982, New York) received her MFA in photography from the University of Arizona. Her work has been supported through residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. She lives and works between Los Angeles and Mexico City. This is her first exhibition with Ltd Los Angeles.