PATH
— If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
Nicola Tesla
Pulsating threads, amoeba- like pods, rainbow pools of color, and surging tentacles swim freely in Anne Pearce’s latest artworks, all in a dimensional flux, triggering varying states of consciousness in any who care to see and feel.
“I have an unmediated brain,” Pearce acknowledges; “I’m one hundred percent porous. And I make art every day no matter what. This work is about my geographical and psychic experiences through time.”
Pearce’s abstract, mixed media artworks in Path are hence diaristic. The works are cut, spliced and collaged from one large painting she made over the last year and a half as she moved from Wyoming to Kansas City and finally, California. Pearce’s art has always reflected her peregrinations to numerous sites on the planet, but now she has merged her personal time frame with particular insights re the earth’s billion plus years of existence. The branches, veins and layers of strata in her art reference not only the physical steps she has taken over the years, but the psychic, lidar- like connections she makes “to everything that has lived or died.”
There are noteworthy differences between Pearce’s earlier art, known for its sensuous, flowing beauty, and the works in Path, which fearlessly explore the shadow side. Her collages have the same impact as aerial views of landscape or cross section cuts through the earth, while also denoting the deepest of interior landscapes, both biological and emotional.
Blue Sea I and First plunged in Firefly are two of several works that visually reference water, and that are also oceanic in feeling. As with all the works in Path, the sublime and the toxic co-exist, equal parts metaphor for both ecological, and sentient states of being. Whales could sequester in First Plunged in Firefly, and fossilized marine life – or is it toxic oil spills? - might inhabit Sea Beds Dried. Both works could also refer to psychological states that are meditative or despairing.
Does Words Resting in Guts denote swallowed emotions or lethal wastelands? Well Worth Waiting could signify orange poppies in all their glory, noxious fires consuming oilfields, or a state of celebratory well-being. Watson’s Fire and Funeral, with its venomous dark coils, is both seductive and scary; it is ominous, while its patches of glowing indigo hint at the possibility of phoenix rising in the form of clean waters and clear skies.
Cosmic in nature, the works in Path evoke a sense of timelessness at once environmental and spiritual; they also allude to the possibilities of destruction and/or rebirth.
One of Pearce’s favorite books is Micromegas, Voltaire’s seminal 1752 work of science fiction in which two giant aliens from Sirius and Saturn travel the universe together and visit the planet Earth. The humans are indescribably tiny to the giants, but they converse with them anyway, finding them somewhat intelligent and learned. That is, until they learn that humans subscribe to Aquinas’ theory that the universe was made solely for them; at that point the aliens fall over laughing, realizing that Earth’s inhabitants refuse to acknowledge their smallness in the scope of life. Which is one of the points of Path.
Compassion is embodied, nonetheless, in Pearce’s oeuvre. It allows us to understand that past, present and future realities are malleable. We can choose transcendence or remain unconscious; both are both distinct options.
Elisabeth Kirsch