Artist's Statement

I am a painter motivated by concerns related to the constitution of the self through history, memory and desire. The focus of my research and production is primarily gender and sexuality as constructed through norms produced by educational materials and scientific systems. My work involves the manipulation and sublimation of the staged photographic images found in textbook and encyclopedic source material from the 1950's and '60's. Produced to educate young people at the public and high school levels, this material was published at a time when North American values were deeply constituted through imagery. Interested in how the past shapes the present, I use this period as a matrix for investigating social formation and continuities in human experience. Much of my work is in series or "clusters", resulting from associations shaped by a critical approach to investigations of social and cultural meanings.

Using source imagery from textbook and encyclopaedic materials comes from my desire to expose these representations for what they are: the familiar and taken-for-granted reproductions of what gets constituted as 'natural' and 'normal'. In order to evoke the source material, and also to challenge notions of painting that reduce it to the materiality of the medium alone, I work representationally through a photo-realist approach and grisaille application. For me, painting transforms imagery to the level of the symbolic, more effectively enacting how the repeated and legitimized representations in educational materials function in the everyday.

Rebecca Anweiler