Text on Method
Abstraction performance Unrealistic coloring animal fantasy anxiety of identity cultural roles macabre horror satire humor
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 body parts, animals, skins, and bright colors, 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.
Text On Method
The key elements to my work are rooted in a kind of performance based photography. In my early yeas working with images, I found it a daunting task 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 values 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 fear and 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 myserious, humorous, and have a kind of saterical quality-especially as they followed a project largely referenceing 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 nosie?", but the quesiton was more about what happens in the lives of animals, isolated from us. So the asethic of the lights, and the color creates a kind of "what is going on here", question, but one which there is no real answer.
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.
TOOLS/TECHNIQUES The fashion asethetic is an important part of my process. I love the affect of abstract and disdorting lights. When I first started to learn to use flash and color, I was really moved by the way that an area can look phyically 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 me to 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 backroud. It creates 'spectors', shadow figures which fall in another color behind them. All of these qualites help to invent these fictional spaces, which ficiton events and relationships.
I think I became more comfortable working with animals than with models or even friends. I think partly because we’re all so narcissistic (us humans) and I think I can make images that are just as moving and interesting about a creature which people might have a harder time seeing themselves in.
chasing whims, or spurts of curiosity until i am not interested anymore or to figure out why i was interested in the first place
I have a thought that I should do something, and it seems better to try it than forget about it.
I initially started working with self portraiture as a way to stop pointing the camera at seemingly random things. If i wanted to understand my practice, or desire to have one, it seemed logical to try and grasp that urge via exploring myself-since i guess thats what all this is supposed to be about anyway. As I continued on path that project of self portraits, I was just tired of talking about the female body, and feminism. and in what seemed like a masterful idea, I jumped right from my body to big, belted galloway cows from my hometown. It immediately felt like some grand thing to have stumbled upon, and that working with cows was going to some how deliver to me exactly what it was I was trying to find. I think I became more comfortable working with animals than with models or even friends. I think partly because we’re all so narcissistic (us humans) and I think I can make images that are just as moving and interesting about a creature which people might have a harder time seeing themselves in.
Farm animals are usually depicted in a pretty humorous way. Goofy pictures of cows, or sheep. But when you blast them with expensive lights, they take on a more refined and stylist look. Its like placing a farm animal in some high budget fashion shoot. What I find so interesting about the fashion aesthetic is that it reates a fantasy about society. that were all beautiful, and having these grand and otherworldly experiences. I like applying that same, uncommon view to animals. With out these images, there is no glamor for animals. I know cows are not science fiction sex objects, but now they look like it.
trying not to push my work too far away from myself but focusing too heavily on the specifics of animal rights, because I guess 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 to animals, and to the cruellty of others, and some people are so cold and seem to skate by totally unphased. I guess that also can refer to my interest in horror, grotesque, violence, and the essentially dark and sinister. The dark literature and poetry of someone like Maldoror just seems more honest and true than something that is lyrical and naturally light and beautiful. 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 HP Lovecraft.
the long pig
Anne Lamb has been working with photography, color, and photoshop shenanigans to create bizarre images of human and animals. Her work explores identity, sexual anxiety, social roles, and the larger scale of objectifcaiton.