Please join us for an exhibition walkthrough with the artist.

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.

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