Anne Harris WIP
May 18th – June 22nd
Anne Harris is always trying to do the real thing — the true thing. You can see the way she draws in her paintings: scratching, scrawling, negative space background painted on top, anything it takes to make the painting actualize what it’s trying to become. The thing is making itself in front of you. I imagine Anne in the early morning light, electricity in the air, guiding the brush as it caresses the surfaces — makes my hairs behind my ears stand on end just thinking about it.
After seeing an Anne Harris Instagram post where she was opining about being unable to decide whether or not paintings were finished, we asked her if she wanted to exhibit a re-enactment of her studio work-in-progress wall. To our great surprise she was agreeable to the project, going so far as to volunteer to come before the opening and spend time in the gallery creating the wall anew.
Anne says she wants her “paintings to function like an eyelid, veering from dry to wet, inside to outside, opaque to transparent, form to formless, mute to aggressive, space curved outward toward the viewer, held in by fragile surface tension, the picture plane as membrane, the entire painting an eyelid.”
An excerpt from an interview with Christopher Lowrence, “Anne Harris: On Finishing,” MW Capacity:
CL: Is your relationship to finishing troubling to you at all?
AH: I have problems with the word “finish.” It implies that there’s a foregone conclusion—something polished off. I prefer the word “resolved” or just “done.” For me a painting’s done when it exists as a living fact, like the nose on my face. This is it—my nose. Whether or not I like it, my face is done. Change my nose and I am undone.
There’s the Nelson Algren quote: “…like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
****
Anne Harris has exhibited her paintings and drawings at venues ranging from Alexandre Gallery (NYC), DC Moore Gallery (NYC), and Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago), to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, The Portland Museum of Art, the California Center for Contemporary Art and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Her work is in such public collections as The Fogg Museum, The Yale University Art Gallery, The New York Public Library and The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden. Grants and awards received include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an NEA Individual Artists Fellowship. She is also the originator of The Mind’s I, a drawing project done with other artists which has traveled and exhibited nationally and internationally, including Dalton Warehouse in Los Angeles and Espacio Andrea Brunson in Santiago, Chile.