| Those of us who choose to live in a large city are over-stimulated and confronted moment-by-moment with a myriad of choices. Our boundaries are penetrated every time we step into a jammed subway train, a packed bus, a crowded intersection. Information, en-mass, presents itself every millisecond, and in order to maintain focus, we must sift through the details and retain only what we find necessary or interesting. Consciously and unconsciously, we make choices about what information we keep. My work is about this process. |  |
Eleanna Anagnos lives and works in New York.
Those of us who choose to live in a large city are over-stimulated and confronted moment-by-moment with a myriad of choices. Our boundaries are penetrated every time we step into a jammed subway train, a packed bus, a crowded intersection. Information, en-mass, presents itself every millisecond, and in order to maintain focus, we must sift through the details and retain only what we find necessary or interesting. Consciously and unconsciously, we make choices about what information we keep. My work is about this process.
My compositions rely on the synthesis of accumulated marks. In concert, these marks bear evidence of the events that fill our own lives—not just the noticeable ones, but also the moments sometimes beneath notice—those too small to see, even though daily life is suffused with them. My work is born without the notion of conclusion. Through a deep connection to my process—one that involves building up and breaking down, incorporating and wiping away, working more intuitively in one session and more formally in the next—I focus on creating a system of exchange between personal history, mood, and the anxiety of a restless mind and the formulations (volume, variation, repetition, touch, and color) of drawing and painting.
Central to my work is the constant variable of change. As if throwing a proverbial wrench in my own plans, I flip my paper or canvas to disorient my compositions. From there, I rework my pieces to make visual sense of the new orientation. My process imbues my paintings and drawings with a pulse, a rhythm that endures long after I have decided that my content can stand alone.
In many of my drawings, the repetitive, short strokes of graphite serve as a standard rhythm—the routine, time ticking on the clock. Working with paint and mixed media, I manipulate surfaces to examine motion, space, speed, tension, and the multiple functions of material which I work fast and slow, thick and thin, in drips, gobs, and in clusters. Should too much visual information accumulate, I intentionally rub portions away, though some of the more quick-absorbing media cannot be completely erased. Inevitably, traces of previous choices are left behind; a record of prior decision-making is kept.
In my paintings, I slash color across the canvas to cue movement, I seamlessly and surprisingly advance from one thought, behavior, memory, or action to the next; with assertive and instinctual strikes, I make reference to humor, playfulness, and even aggression in ways planned decisions simply cannot intimate. Even so, these elements of disorder are held together through rigid marks that emulate the sturdiness of architecture.
In relinquishing control of the work, I ultimately discover that meaning reveals itself. My paintings and drawings breathe. They exist as living proof of the abundant information, feeling, and physicality so intimately encoded in the process and therefore, in the raw materials themselves.
