ARTIST STATEMENT
Through performance, video, and sound, I create embodied explorations of how vulnerability, interdependence, and trust can be looped and repeated over themselves to create a net of loving kindness. Working in 4D allows me to be explicit about the labor and endurance involved in cooperative connection and devotional care.
Whether publicly interactive or created collaboratively with multiple performers, all projects address platonic, romantic, and familial intimacy simultaneously, as these are the mutually inclusive strands with which we weave our nets. With gentle, connection-focused actions I seek to dissolve the barrier between knowing something and feeling it; I’m curious as to how aligning actions with words might begin to repair the disconnect often found there, and build resilience in my own queer future and in our collective heart.
From this perspective, I ask viewers to invest time and faith—a request of the audience that gestures toward the commitment and conviction required to build love. These active examinations of internalized values and revisitings of often-told stories illuminate unconscious beliefs and create new muscle memories needed for a less transactional and more transformative future.
It is my understanding that the drive to try anyway–to attempt to grow, hope, and thrive together in community in the face of so many unknowns and so little control–is our species’ collective insanity and communal tenderness, and the only thing lighting our way into an uncertain future.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anna Brody (they/she) is an artist and educator currently working on unceded Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui land in Tucson, AZ, and unceded Wampanoag land in Martha’s Vineyard, MA. They work with video, performance, and photography to describe and explore the non-linear, non-binary world of simultaneous connection and lateral growth. Their video installations and interactive performances express a lifetime preoccupation with the layering of romantic, familial, and platonic love relationships in our lives, and the mutual labor and trust required for them to thrive. As a queer and non-binary artist and educator, she hopes only to shift decisively away from the transactional, and towards the transformational. Anna graduated magna cum laude with a B.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and received her M.F.A. in Photo, Video, & Imaging from the University of Arizona in May 2021. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Anthropology of Motherhood exhibition in Pittsburgh and G.A.S. Station in Berlin. Anna is also proud to be the head of development and an active board member at the Land With No Name Sanctuary.
© Anna Brody