Anne Hars is a Los Angeles based artist who comments on spaces through her paintings, drawings, photography and, more recently, urban gardens. She received her MFA in 2004 from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, has exhibited widely in California and has participated in residences around the country including the Hammer Museum, Cooper Union and the Vermont Studio Center. Anne has recently started a gallery in Los Angeles called The Thinkery.Drew:
We met in Prague in the early 1990s. I remember visiting your studio in the former Zensky Dum (House for Women). I was captivated by the space. Your drawings remind me of it: an intersection of planes at uncommon angles. This is a big theme for you isn't? Defining space in drawings or improving space with your urban garden projects.
Anne:
Before the garden series I was most excited about creating spaces in which to enter, and about that phenomenological process of entering into a work. I started with drawings that were very, very small and had to be looked at with a magnifying glass. It was such a simple way to make something otherworldly. In a lot of sci fi blackness isn’t infinity, endless whiteness is. Blackness is the universe, a place with destinations, stars and planets. Whiteness is without destination, its fog, chance and aloneness. When one creates worlds on paper one can create utopias - as long as they are just for one. Utopias for One. It’s the only way utopias can work, really. I mean, if you create a utopia, you can still have guests over to visit your utopia, they just can’t overstay their welcome. For years I have heard people call utopianism “utopic”. Is that a real word? It sounds so medical, so clinical, like an unwanted growth. Or like ectopic, which means out of place and refers to a fertilized egg growing on the wrong side of a uterus. Which seems like a common idea of what a utopia is; an out of place fertile growth that nonetheless cannot sustain. Now I’ve just talked my way into really liking the word utopic.
Drew:
Do you think living in Prague influenced this interest in spaces? In Prague every inch of the center is considered and detailed and full of human touch. Moving back to the US, with its abandoned lots, concrete and asphalt splatterings is hard to swallow. Or did you take away a different experience from Prague: the air pollution, hard winters and communist blunders?
Anne:
I had been living alone in the desert of Arizona for a year before going to Prague. I was an apprentice to a figurative sculptor who was very old and I slept in a makeshift foundry. I was like an urchin. I slept under so many covers in the winter that my arms went numb at night from the weight and I would wake and have to flail them off me (I slept with them folded over me for extra heat). Mice would run through the layers of blankets. I had to forage for firewood by a creek. I don’t think most American girls were living like that, but what did I know. Arizona was escape from the cold wet marshes of New England with its puritanical smallness. It was infinite space and I was safe from the claustrophobia of family history. I could have spent all my time marveling at distance but the old sculptor insisted I draw nudes six hours a day, work in the foundry for two banging away at figurative bronzes and only then could I go stare at infinity for a few hours as long as I had a sketch book and produced drawings. Maybe that’s why I don’t draw people.
Then it was time for my European tour (I had only read old books in which this is done) so I went, and I loved it because I couldn’t understand anyone! Bliss! The immense silence! Why would anyone actually learn another language when not learning was so fantastic? I loved sitting in the midst of so much humanity and not understanding words. Speech was the musical accompaniment to the architecture: Europe for an American is like shrinking oneself down and running around in the endless flourishes of a Baroque frame.
When I got back to America I entered a convenience store and almost fainted in front of a wall of candy wrappers. Not infinite space. A wall of visual white noise.
So the flourish is immensely important idea for me. Prague is architectural glossolalia, the flourishes took over and encrusted the city. The servant usurped its master. Who needs the art when you have a frame of ever expanding intricacies?
Drew:Your flying fans and vector mountain drawings are interesting because the mountains are stand-alone objects so the fans that are broken and fragmented, laying waste on the mountains, seem more like victims of a unfair obstacle than their own misdirection. Are these images just about those simple surfaces or do they have a deeper meaning and metaphors of the fragility of life or the unfortunate chance of some relationships?
Anne:
America is all about walls of like things. Things always are standing in for the things they resemble. When I came to Los Angeles to go to grad school I got a small apartment in Pasadena. So many apartments have low ceilings here but they all have ceiling fans. To me, many interiors feel threatening. When I was a kid I lived in a huge dilapidated Victorian mansion with no central heating and lots of raccoons. My parents were basically caretakers - a wildly misused word in their case. There were chairs that had elaborately carved caryatids of men arching their backs violently backwards to support the armrests. I was so horrified by the plight of these little men and the cruelty of the chair for their imprisonment. What an awful thing! Most of the furniture terrified me. A soft red velvet chair would have spiky bits of horsehair jutting through or a brass tack worked loose would jab and tear. It all seemed to threaten instead of comfort. But I think, like a lot of kids who grow up in broken homes (divorce, insanity, abuse, what have you), there is a certain amount of transference that takes place. Memory isn’t a recording of events, it’s a compilation of the smallest fragments of clues to prod a fiction of sorts that make sense of all the emotions left stewing.
Remember the beginning of Apocalypse Now? The guy is staring up at a ceiling fan and it brings back a rush of memories, flashbacks. So ceiling fans became the icon for flashbacks to war. And then, because I work in architecture, I love icons for things in 3-d programs, the clunkier the rendering the better. Icons are like the fragments of memory we use to restructure a memory, so my stand-in (a simply rendered icon from a 3-d architecture program) became the Meta stand-in for the fragment of memory that goads memory.
Drew:
Though your drawings make use of crisp vector lines, the photos on your site are quite the opposite, vague and mysterious. Are those a way for you to comment on and push a medium which is typically too predictable and defined?
Anne:I did some huge pieces on muslin, 9' square, of interiors that were really a jumble of icons of interior and exterior stuff. They were really white and washed out. I hung them really low so you could feel like you could just step through into them. I called them Heaven at Eye-level. There are a lot of songs about heaven that depict it as a giant house that has everything you could ever want for. I made the work and I was listening to interviews with and about Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who researched near death experiences and white light experiences. A majority of the descriptions of white light experiences involve a misty bright white space in which the “traveler” meets with family and friends.
But there is a lighter side to my work. I mean, its pretty absurd. I did a series of drawings in which lawn mowers and bidets interact. One can’t survive without absurdity. It's super important. I like work that is both funny and serious depending on the viewers mood. Sean Landers once told me his favorite work was both stupid and clever. I think I generally agree with that, except I’d use the terms poignant and absurd.
Drew:
Is your involvement with greening urban spaces simply a human reaction or do you think it is a particular calling for you as a visual person who can identify and correct blights?
Anne:
All my projects are artworks. I am working as an artist and I reside in a community and I do what I want. Material is all around.
I think the artist I aspire to be is one unhindered by current or past definitions of art and what form it should take. I do what I love and what works. I see a very strong coherence in my practice that is not, perhaps evident by what things look like. I do, however, think its time to step up to the plate and take responsibility for every aspect of artistic production especially in choices concerning materials. I’m really not interested in art comprised of resin poured over stuff, for instance. The first artist we showed at The Thinkery, though, showed work of that exact description but with a crucial difference. She had worked for a local art celebrity who used tons of resin and toxic materials. She rescued the detritus - the bits of hardened clumps which would have gone on to kill sea turtles and poison landfills - and incorporated them into shrines, devotional pieces and powerful vignettes about connection and isolation. They were great because the actual material could be questioned and then one could move on into the complexities and layers of meaning. It wasn’t because she wanted the look of resin poured over wood, it was there, it was someone else’s oblivion that she took up and transformed.
That’s a crucial difference.
Drew:
Thank you for your time. Are there any new projects on the horizon?
Anne:
I’ll continue to cultivate my garden.