Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Video, performance, sound, text
Website: annewalshjunior.org
Anne Walsh was born in 1962 in New York City and has lived and worked in Berkeley, California for many years. She received her BA in Art History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches new genres, video, and creative writing. She has curated exhibitions for the OR Gallery in Vancouver, the Beall Center for Art and Culture at UC Irvine, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, and New Langton Arts in San Francisco. She was an editor of X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly from 1997 to 2004 and has been a contributing editor since. With artist Chris Kubick she produced the spoken-word audio series Art After Death and a body of video and sculptural sound installation work. Her book Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh was published by no place press / MIT Press in 2019. Her work has been reviewed twice in Artforum and covered in the East Bay Express and SFGate.
Walsh describes her artistic medium as "study." She works in video, performance, audio, photography, and text, frequently engaging collaborators in the retelling of histories and the translating of texts — a process whose risks, desires, and failures give unstable shape to the completed work. Her practice is deeply concerned with language and time: how works and lives get re-mediated, how texts transform across forms, and what gets lost or created in translation. Her decade-long engagement with Leonora Carrington's 1950 feminist novella The Hearing Trumpet — which included meeting the author, corresponding with her, staging gallery-based notebooks imagining film versions of the book, and ultimately producing her own published visual and written adaptation — is emblematic of how she works: sustained, personal, and formally expansive.
Her collaborative sound installation In Full Metal Jackets (2005), made with Chris Kubick, fills multi-story gallery spaces with 28 speakers emitting sounds of bullet casings dropping on different surfaces, while a monitor scrolls the audio file names — "44 Magnum Bullet Casing Concrete Drop," "multishell barrage for liquid bullet effect" — rendering military hardware uncanny through the language of studio sound engineering. Her video Anthem (2014–2015) documents a troupe of Oakland senior citizens learning and rehearsing the Oscar-winning song from Disney's Frozen, deploying absurdist humor in the service of something genuinely moving about age, community, and popular culture.
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