| I am an interdisciplinary artist, using the mediums of photography, video, and new media as forms of expression. My work explores the nature of performance, reality, and the moments in between. I am interested in the conflict between what is being represented and what is, under closer observation, actually occurring. The Exit Series explores longing, desire, betrayal, and the loss of control brought on by the emergence of adolescence from childhood. Everyday situations take on ritualized significance, emphasizing the transformative power of the recorded image to distill a seemingly banal moment into a heightened, significant event. |
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Ana Black is a Canadian artist working in both New York City and Vancouver.
Ana Black, Untitled, (Suicide Fantasy), Exit Series, 2003. C-print, 43.5 x 52.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
I am an interdisciplinary artist, using the mediums of photography, video, and new media as forms of expression. My work explores the nature of performance, reality, and the moments in between. I am interested in the conflict between what is being represented and what is, under closer observation, actually occurring.
The Exit Series explores longing, desire, betrayal, and the loss of control brought on by the emergence of adolescence from childhood. Everyday situations take on ritualized significance, emphasizing the transformative power of the recorded image to distill a seemingly banal moment into a heightened, significant event. By pushing the boundaries of the willing suspension of disbelief, a tension is formed. These fragmented narrative works are left open, having no specific past or future, forcing the viewer to reach their own conclusions. These constructed realities are an interplay between the sublime and the ordinary. Everyday scenes take on new significance. Multiple possibilities exist for the past and the future, each changing the meaning of the present. Their internal tensions create a sensory event that is something more than what one originally interprets. Psychological ambiguity is manifested in the pictorial form as real and imagined anxieties and experiences. These works lie in the intersections between attraction and repulsion, between the fantastical and the real.
By allowing us into the elusive transitional world of childhood fantasy and rites of passage, the suspended narratives presented in this series question how we recall, reconstruct, and record our own histories, a place where the division between reality and illusion are intertwined.
