Anna Brody
Anna Brody (she/they) is an artist and educator currently based out of Tucson, Arizona and some other places. She works to explore the non-linear, non-binary world of simultaneous connection and lateral growth. Their art express a lifetime preoccupation with the layering of romantic, familial, and platonic love relationships in our lives, and the mutual labor and trust required for them to thrive. As a queer and non-binary artist and educator, they hope only to shift decisively away from the transactional, and towards the transformational. Anna graduated magna cum laude with a B.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and received her M.F.A. in Photo, Video, & Imaging from the University of Arizona in May 2021. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Yale MFA Thesis exhibition and a screening at Librería Casa Bosques in Mexico City in 2021.
active care / trying anyway
Working both intuitively and formulaically, I explored the methods used to love people within the more physical realm of culturally ubiquitous materials. Relational strategies such as mimicry, grooming, adulation, and quality time were used to draw a tender parallel between the work we put into human relationships and the arguably pointless process of trying to learn the inner nature of a common object. Here, I deal with source and context - where we are from, what emotional and physical material we are born with and born into, what we absorb and what we repeat. This work evolved into a practice of the labor involved in retraining a mind away from the priorities of our economy in the hopes that challenging the valuation of production over reproduction might result in a more caring union. It is about learning to try with no intention of succeeding, while unlearning that non-success implies failure. It is about trusting that the effort of understanding is worth it, no matter what the outcome.
trying anyway was Anna's first foray into sculpture, and there is nowhere on earth she would rather have it live than out here on the Land.