Text on Method

Text on Method:

Bio: Anne Lamb is an American artist primarily working with photography. Her work uses the body to explore the complexity of human emotions and the continuous invisible transformations we experience, revealing them as monstrosities, and encounters with fantastical beings. Through the assembling of human skins, nonhuman parts, and bright colored lights, Lamb creates a fictional realm where sexual anxiety,identity, and altered sensorial perceptions are explored. In this space built by performance, intimacy, and light, Lamb explores strange relationships which transport the audience to a altered world, jarred open by uncommon games. We step in to quaint fragmented realities where we are welcomed to engage in lucid dreaming populated by colorful distortions. Anne Lamb graduated with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2011, and is studying Media Deisgn at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. She has worked for artists such as Marilyn Minter, Tim Barber, and Ryan McGinley. 
Method: The key elements to my work are rooted in a kind of performance based photography. In my early images, I found it daunting to try and focus my lens on a uniquely underexposed subject or genre. With the proliferation of masses of stale, common images, and stacks upon stacks of social documentary and portrait books, I was looking to create something of my own to make images of. In a fit of anxiety, and paranoia tied to cultural circumstances which I felt limited by, I started working with performance based photography and self portraiture. In this work, I essentially created a stage and played the role of my own anxiety, wrapped in color and an environment I envisioned for my personal dystopian future. As I started to get tired of working in what was essentially a photo studio, and talking about the 'image of female', I started looking for some new 'thing' I could make, and depict. And in what seemed like a masterful idea, I jumped right from my body to big, belted galloway cows from my hometown. I immediately felt like they were some grand and epic subject to have stumbled upon, and I felt that this project was going to some how deliver to me exactly what it was I was trying to talk about. After my self portraits, the emphasis became so much on feminist art history, the objectification of women, and yes, all of those things are important aspects, but in the current climate for women in the arts, I wonder if it is more important to prove your equality by making work that is equal in strength to a man, and not necessarily work that is only about the fact that female work is less valuable than a mans. So with these early cows, I wanted to make something that was mine-and that was not about being female, but more directly tied to my personal whims, inclinations, interests, inspirations, and curiosities. And in a big a big way, I feel like I succeeded. I love this project because the images are mysterious, humorous, and have a kind of satirical quality-especially as they followed a project largely referencing erotics. To a friend, I described my intentions for the project before it began, and I remember telling her "I want to make pictures of cows that echo the question "If a tree falls, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a noise?", but the question was more about what happens in the lives of animals, isolated from us. So the aesthetic of the lights, and the color creates a kind of "what is going on here", question, but one which there is no real answer. My most recent "finished" work was the Beefcakes project. The "Beefcakes" series was kind of a collage of both projects. Although I had wanted to move away from the female body talk, I can't deny that those issues are not on my mind, and that they are not a part of my work. This project got away from me a little bit though. With my first cows, I got exactly what I wanted, but here, what I made is not what I had envisioned when I set out. And in the way, I don't feel like these images are complete, or that they are a total success. In this series, I find myself wanting to photoshop out the woman and just leave the cow. But I went back, and tried the cow alone, and that isn't just right either. As I move forward with new naked cow images, I am trying to smooth those edges, and finish the project in a way where it feels more complete. The dream on my agenda currently is muscular male dancers with muscular cows. I have an image in my mind, and I have three men casted, but I am currently searching for the right cow. With this kind of project, safety is an obstacle, and animals tend to show more aggression towards men. But hopefully, I find the cow with the right temperament, and the images will consist of muscular male bodies with the fat, sculptural cows and bulls. I am hoping that the pair of soft female skin across the wrinkly Brahman will feel better once there is this comparison of masculinity, femininity, and an emphasis on shapes of animals. I guess there is still kind of this question of why cows, especially after self portraits. I did want to move away from the hyper feminist focus, but I didn't want to focus too heavily on the specifics of animal rights either. I think its pretty obvious that I am sensitive to that. But what kind of escapes me are the specifics of why some people are more prone to feel empathetic towards animals, and other people are so cold and seem to skate by, totally unphased by the most obscenely cruel institutionalised processes. I think this aspect also can refer to my interest in horror, grotesque, and violence. I tend to think that people are more captivated by darkness than the light hearted. For example, the dark poetry of someone like Maldoror just seems more impactful than something that is lyrical and naturally light. For example, some one like Walt Whitman never appealed to me, but the dark tales of romance and drama in a Joyce carol Oates story, or the macabre fantasy of science fiction horror films. I'm not sure if this kind of writing romanticises violence, but it definitely has a stronger impact for me than softer genres. ARTISTIC RESEARCH As far as my personal research, I am focusing on the traditions of feminist art works, western appropriations of esoteric traditions, horror and science fiction genres, satire, and eroticism. My initial interest in all of these genres is their shared aesthetic of grotesque imagery. I don't know what it is about fear, violence, and captivity, but it is as terrifying as it is interesting. I'm not particularly interesting in the psychology of people capable of horrible things, but I am interesting in the manor in which those events are portrayed. In addition to horror and violence, I aim to pull from the imagery of "near death" encounters: they always tell of an overwhelming bright light. Same thing occurs with ecstatic hallucination, and psychedelic experiences. The place where all of this is leaning is the area I want to center my work around.

TOOLS/TECHNIQUES The fashion aesthetic is an important part of my process. I love the affect of abstract and distorting lights. When I first started to learn to use flash and color, I was really moved by the way that an area can look physically burned, or damaged in some way simply by the proximity of the light to the subject. It has a metaphorical quality of the infliction of one's gaze. The myth of reality, and angles of perception, distortion, and representation are all aspects of seeing which the affect the lights help support. Not only do the lights alter the lines of the subject, but they are able to crate a space, and change the subjects relation to their backroad. It creates 'spectors', shadow figures which fall in another color behind them. All of these qualities help to invent these fictional spaces, in which I can create fictional events and relationships.