Anna Speer
Sundogs
I often wonder about the experiences of my parents as children. I wish I could have seen them interact with the world outside the context of a parent-child relationship. How would this influence my perception of them now? My work is driven by what lies just out of view; I am captivated by absence, disconnect, and fragmentation.
Through painting, I examine familiarity and what it means to truly know someone. When focusing on my immediate family, I experience anticipatory nostalgia and communicate this feeling through color and symbolism. Utilizing old family film scans, I alter figures to convey the blurred lines between strangers and family. I know the people in these images are related to me, yet for the most part I do not know their names or stories. This allows me to construct a surreal and ambiguous narrative based off of found and composed images, strengthening our familial ties in new, strange, and interesting ways.
The settings in my work can feature recurring symbols, such as pools. In the painting entitled Sundogs, the pool acts as a domestic portal, creating a gateway to an unstirred, uncanny, and surreal suburbia for viewers. Sundogs features altered figures from old family film. They jump into a strange, imagined pool, representing the area in between the unconscious and conscious mind; a liminal and dream-like area. The atmosphere is still despite the figure's motion. The divers jump into the water from above and although there are three suns, it is still dark.
Pairing with my interest in familial roles and dynamics, I am currently interested in the individualistic nature of the suburbs, the structure of family, and the way communication (or lack thereof) plays a role in the social atmosphere of these structures. A lack of communication creates a vast and uncanny void present in both relationships and spaces. Through painting, I reach into this space to grab distorted stories and combined memories that are both personal and distant, reshaping them into a new conversation.