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Anne Arden McDonald

January 11 – February 23

Artist's Statement

The Photograph is the Terrain

These landscapes are not places you can go and visit—they exist only in the interaction between an actual space and an antique plastic camera.

When I use this camera to photograph the landscape, it creates an image that has the quality of a memory—this is my grandmother's garden, this is the path I walked on when I was a child—when you try to seize the details in your mind to study them closely, they burn away like mist.

Vague images are interpretive—you can bring your experience to them as they are not insistently telling you what they are.

This camera, called a Diana, has a plastic lens, which causes the image to be blurry and vignetted—the image looks as if it is coming up from under water or out of a dream.

Biography

Anne Arden McDonald was born in London England and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. From age 15 to 30 she made self-portraits, building installations in the landscape or abandoned interiors and making private performances for her camera in these spaces.

More recently she has been working with a plastic camera and doing sculpture and installation work. In the past 10 years, she has had 30 solo exhibitions in 10 countries (135 total shows in 14 countries) and has been published extensively, including most recently in Aperture Magazine. Her work is in the collections of five major museums. She is represented by several galleries, including Sarah Morthland in New York and Photo Eye in Santa Fe. She is also a private dealer for 12 Czech and Slovak photographers who do performances for the camera and she does lectures on the history of staged photography. She is presently working on a book of her self-portrait work.

Artist's Résumé

Diana #44

Diana #1