I make paintings, photography and video and artists’ books. My paintings consist of oil paintings on metal and they are gestures towards rearranging the landscape as a result of climate change. There is an ambiguity on how to read this, both with difficulty and also with aesthetic curiosity and joy. The photography and video have occupied an arena with a sense of irony, beauty, and loss. I like to identify the heart of American idealism around nature and tinker with or attack that. I am creating a sense of disruption with those very things we hold dear and want to savor for the future generation. The world we leave to the next generation will have remnants of what has gone before, but even the documentation will be challenged.

I am making photographs and video that selects and plunges American icons of nature, seminal works of art history, and particular environmental landscapes that are fertile for social import. I am rearranging meaning like using a sublime gesture to spoil the sublime landscape. Climate change and the rising level of water, and the issue of water in itself has become a central focus in my work, which has led me to collaborate with science. I am performing hydrodynamic experiments in tanks, creeks, rivers, oceans, and various other bodies of water. Sometimes I stage the photographs as a puppet master might do, and other times I use underwater equipment to record water light, and animal phenomena as it interacts with the camera. I am also using sound elements as a tool of irony in the single channel video.

Recently, I have begun multi channel works that are collaborations with other artists and composers. We are redefining the notion of ensemble and making works that are equally conceived between sound and video.

Currently, I am making a work: Men and Women in Water Cities. This work is in progress, and involves, actors, and filming people in predicaments underwater. The work is inspired by Robert Longo’s paintings: Men in Cities, but takes off in unexpected directions. This work has been my most ambitious project to date. It involves traveling to various water cities, and using actors and objects, and filming above and under the ocean. I am embarking on inventing a new ocean sport as part of this,that involves a parachute and multi colored balls.

Kim Anno 2011