Title: A Conversation with ... Multi Media Installation Artist Ann Stoddard
Abstract: When did you begin to create installations? When I was 6 or 7 years old, the street and sidewalk were my gallery. I made installations to display on the front steps to share with everyone who passed by, though I kept the one with urine specimens to myself (my father was a physician). I had excellent peripheral vision (lazy eye syndrome) and was instructed to practice seeing with a prism, to synthesize the two distinct, and different visual fields. When I was twelve, I collaborated with my father, who was also a Civil War buff, on making a battlefield diorama. He would capture our family in 3-D with a stereo camera and in film. I picked up imaging techniques from him. I enjoyed the ex-citement and shared viewing experience associated with movies and slide shows. We would pass around a lighted stereo viewer to look at the 3-D slides, whose dramatic layered space suggested an actual depth that made printed photographs look flat, compressed. He taught me to shoot movies and edit in the camera, which gave me a heightened awareness of space and time as well as an affinity for photography and innovative approaches. When I was enlisted in setting up the shots for his movies and stereo slides, it felt like making installations to me. Empty spaces have meaning for me. To me nothing is empty; gaps are stories. Space is full of stories of inclusion and exclusion. Things that are left out have always been important to me. The question I always ask is why. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I began making installations in the early '70s, as my shaped paintings extended into viewer space in a search for ways to eliminate the frame and illusion. I began making large geometric, sprayed lacquer corner pieces that existed in real space (the space of the viewer), involving the viewer in the process of visually deconstructing linear perspective [metonymic in my work for a default orthodox perspective, -Western science, -authority figure]. The viewer's movements, reversed perspective, and mirror finish suggested multiple contradictory interpretations, and contained a feminist subtext. Installation suggested a location to respond to the art historical bias against space, to the sexist, Western subtext privileging form over space (form = positive/male, space=negative/female). Lacking a male default point of view, installation could allow me to incorporate autobiographical material, develop a female subject position in real space where visual arts intersect with politics, science, technology, and life. Painting felt too well-behaved (like a box), sculpture seemed too fixed. Photography lets the viewer look through someone else's eyes. Installation was not default white male elitist art like painting and sculpture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Interests in content, process, feminist art, conceptual art, and the role of the viewer, brought me back to making installations after a decade of painting. In the early 1980s, working in a large studio in downtown Washington D.C., I began working in real space with non-art materials, such as tar paper and screen. At the time, my paintings--as well as most of the art of museums--seemed too irrelevant, too class-based, too white. I was interested in power relations and public space, point of view and context, and searching for a tool for critiquing hierarchies, systems, orthodoxies, and scientific specialization. Installations put all boundaries into question, including public/private ones that silence minorities and women, and art/life divisions that kept viewers at a distance. As presentation installation art makes boundary crossing into ritual transgression, I wanted to work in the space of the viewer, to make art that existed in the space between life and art, a shared space that included the viewer and time. Installations affirm connections and public space, and are less hierarchical and distancing than painting or sculpture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A response to Reagonomics, UnEmployment Division (1983) was an interactive performance installation in which viewers waited in line, answered questions, filled out forms, as they went from office to office (installation to installations) en route to a national homeless shelter, the Classified Ad Lounge (installation). …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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