City of Bloomington, MN Virtual Artistry Exhibits, 2 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: Part 2: Artistry presents Visual Translations featuring artist Anna Carlson

Description

Visual Translations is the latest exhibit at Inez Greenberg Gallery. It features artwork focusing on the challenges of communications by artists Anna Carlson and Nghia Quach. In Part 2 of Visual Translations, meet Anna Carlson.

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To me in my work, visual translations means talking about how to make something that is not visual, able to be seen.

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What I work with is the uh translation of a a voice telling a story into a document or a record that can be seen.

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I think my work is is a collection of documents and all of the documents are about the process of remembering of listening, recording, transcribing and then translating that into a visual piece.

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I work with textiles because that's what I'm familiar with and right now, the stories that I'm working with are conversations with my mother and she was also a textile artist, so maintaining that thread of textiles in this work is important to me.

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I also I love the idea of print making, because it's that repeating of the same thing over and over with variation, and so I work with screen printing in the work, and then I like to use embroidery to put emphasis onto the onto certain words or phrases in the work to bring those out to make them texture that comes out off the surface.

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I started doing these recordings a number of years ago.

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Maybe five or six years ago and just asking mom about her life, and it was really fascinating for me as an artist to hear her talk about her design career, her art career, and I realized there were so many parallels, and so that's what that's what sort of started it.

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I was recording these stories and then I wanted to write them out and then part of the work is also about the ideas behind handwritten manuscripts and a tight like a typography version, because the handwriting is a much more intimate more flowing uh interpretation of the conversation, um but whereas the typography is more of a document, so it feels to me like the work is more permanent.

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If it's in the typography.

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For a very long time, I've used dyes to color fabric and there's a magic to putting a white cloth into a pot and pulling it out and it becomes a different color and you don't always know exactly what color that is and the work in this exhibition um if it uses dyes I've used exclusively indigo a few years ago, I started using this organic indigo that the vat is like a little bit like a sourdough starter, where you have to tend to it every day you have to you know, look at it see how it's doing stir it add a little bit of this add a little bit of that and I find that care that daily care very relaxing, but it also kind of speaks to my relationship with my mom and so I've chosen to use the the indigo in this work.

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I think the the work is really exploring a lot of intersections that happen in a conversation. So I'm I'm thinking about the ideas of voice and hand.

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I'm thinking about the the sort of ephemeral conversation that you have with somebody that that may not really mean anything but then is remembered later and and then I'm documenting those. So it's a lot of sort of documentation, process, listening memory, those kinds of ideas that I'm.

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