Annie Sailer: ARTIST STATEMENT

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a visual artist and a dancer/choreographer. In my paintings and choreography my intention is to evoke emotional and psychological states of mind through suggested imagery, spatial relationships, color, and movement. Frequently an idea will come to me in one medium and end up being realized in another. Sometimes I work with parallel content in both mediums at once, each one informing the other. And although my work is for the most part abstract, it is often generated by images that suggest specific, underlying content.

My paintings have a post-Abstract Expressionist/Pop aesthetic and are stylistically influenced by Japanese street fashion, kimonos, and block prints combined with motifs from high and low culture. I am also influenced by the art of my biological father George Sears Greene, who was an Abstract Expressionist painter. My materials include acrylic paint, Flashe, and mixed-media on canvas. Some of my paintings are more graphic while others are looser and more painterly. Particular color choices and extreme color combinations play a primary role in creating the feel of each painting. My visual language includes unexpected spatial relationships, and forms that are layered, patterned, deep, and sometimes outlined, while simultaneously remaining flat. Frequently I construct my paintings by partially blocking out areas with additional forms so that a sense of depth is created by building outward. Large shapes sit on top of others suggesting that something is hidden behind them, while still revealing some of what is underneath. The picture plane extends off the canvas in all directions. Forms float, trickle, accumulate, and fall.

Annie Sailer Dance Company (New York) was established in 2001. Through natural movement and spatial relationships, generated by imagery, I create dances that evoke the unconscious. My choreography is influenced by my life experience, Japanese aesthetics and by Nancy Meehan, with whose company I performed in 1984 and 1985. There is a direct physicality and sense of weight to my movement vocabulary. My choreography has an understated quality that implies emotional and psychological states of mind. For the past two years ASDC has been performing structured improvisations that are directed by me, but developed collectively by the company. The structures are non-frontal and bleed off the performing space in a way similar to my paintings. Movement sequences overlap, freeze in stillness, and are repeated or referred to in various groupings, facings, and locations. Costuming and occasional sculptural installations work as integral parts of each piece; sometimes generating content and sometimes, simply, providing an additional visual element to the choreography. The designs, colors, and forms refer to my paintings.

Staying true to my process is an essential component in the creation of my art. Like a cartoon I intend all of my work to have an "over-the-top", slightly absurd, irreverent sensibility while simultaneously evoking dream-like narratives.