ANNA MAYER

Moody Center for the Arts, Houston
May 31 - August 17, 2024
Curated by Molly Everett
Resonant Earth explores the connections between the human body and the land through the practices of six contemporary artists: Kelly Akashi, Lisa Alvarado, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Andrea Chung, Sky Hopinka, and Anna Mayer. Full press release.

Installation photographs by Anthony Rathbun.
Thank you to Kai Bosworth, Lucy Carranza, and Jake Dotson.

Second Body, 2024
ceramic with gleaned clay from Houston, inherited crushed dinnerware embedded in purchased clay, discarded butyl rubber, existing gallery furniture
40 x 42.5 x 58 inches
This work was sited in the seating area of the Moody’s entrance gallery, using existing gallery furniture. There are three chairs around the table, corresponding with the three ceramic sculptures.


Working Past the Ocular (Does the Subsurface Need to Be Spoken For?), 2024
ceramic with gleaned clay from Houston and Marfa, discarded butyl rubber, custom wallpaper
11.25 ft H x 24.5 ft L x 3 in D
This installation presents a collection of ceramic implements. Each one is unique, with recurring motifs of drill bits, disembodied eyes, and the sedimentary layers of geologic time. The implements are presented in pairs, to invoke bodily symmetry and the social, domestic significance of ceramics. I started making these diverse forms after years of creating what I call “funeral fringe” for sculptures about mourning. The implements point to what is below the ground, and bring to mind different ways of approaching land use. In areas of intensive fracking, the subsurface is commodified and extensively mapped and imaged. The colonization of the imagination of the underground is a continuation of the ongoing colonial project of the United States.


Blaffer Art Museum, Houston
October 27, 2023 - March 10, 2024
Curated by Jennifer Teets
Intimate confession is a project is a group exhibition that considers transmission, intergenerational life, and cultural inheritance through the prism of intimacy and infrastructure. Artists: Gwenneth Boelens, Benvenuto Chavajay Ixtetelá, ektor garcia, Lonnie Holley, Anna Mayer, Na Mira, Kate Newby, Josie Ann Teets, Chiffon Thomas, Iris Touliatou, and Clémence de La Tour du Pin. Full press release.

Los Angeles Valley College Art Gallery
September 7 – December 8, 2022
Curated by Jason Kunke

We Became the River on Fire features work by Tanya Brodsky, Katy Cowan, and Anna Mayer that explores the boundaries between identity and the objects or symbols we use to represent ourselves. These works play with the apparent presence of the artist's hand in the work of art, or the way the artwork demonstrates its own production.

In April of 2016, a group of children participating in an Easter egg hunt in England’s Surrey county noticed a National Police Air Service helicopter overhead, which was in pursuit of two suspected burglars. According to a police spokesman:

“Initially, the presence of the police helicopter was enough to entertain the children and parents, but it didn’t take the intrepid residents long to realize they were witnessing a police pursuit. The children quickly formed an arrow on the ground in the middle of a ploughed field to guide the helicopter in the direction of the fleeing pair. The helicopter crew relayed this information to officers on the ground and a short time later two men were arrested.”

When the children of Surrey laid down in the ploughed field they made manifest a number of overlapping contemporary concerns: the dissolution of self into symbol; how that dissolution is repeated in the relationship between self and environment; and how authority or authorship serves to translate between the parts of these relationships. We Became the River on Fire brings together artworks that take a variety of approaches to these themes, seeking to explore the possibilities of what we may have already become.

Houston Center for Contemporary Craft
January 30 - May 8, 2021
Review for Momus by Laura August
Review by Sherry Cheng

Anna Mayer’s social and sculptural practice explores the impact of humanity throughout geologic time, with a focus on the temporal relationship between humans and the land beyond an individual’s life span. Her work in the exhibition reflects deeply upon the realities of death and decay. Drawing upon a language of mourning and burial practices, she uses materials like raw clay and porcelain dinnerware to communicate a narrative of what remains when people die and what is left for others to inherit. By grinding pieces of dinnerware she inherited and mixing the bits with raw clay to give it a new texture and purpose, she creates sculptures that appear to seep and bubble-up from the ground. These ceramic works are juxtaposed with a pair of bronze hands and feet that are cast from a composite of Mayer’s own body, along with the fingers and toes of others from communities in Los Angeles and Houston, where the artist has lived. By combining attributes from different people to form a new body, Mayer identifies a need for a society that relies on the collective strength of individuals…. [more writing about the show]

Ceramics + Geologic Time panel discussion
Conversation between Anna Mayer and James Watkins

a project by Visitor Welcome Center, at Arm Gallery

Mourning Ware (Funeral Fringe), 2020
ceramic; purchased clay embedded with found clay surfaced by drought in Niland CA, cut up discarded inner tube
dimensions 2 x 4 x 1 inches

The Mourning Ware ceramics highlight the need of many to grieve, and how imperative it is that we make connections between personal losses and our damaged planet. Typically the pieces are inflected with fragments of crushed dinnerware that I inherited from my parents after they passed away. As I work with this crushed porcelain, it becomes flecks of dust that are scattered, embedded, dispersed, and blown away. These material properties reflect the ways in which behavioral and psychological patterns are passed from one generation to the next. The fringe for Arm Gallery is embedded with clay that has been brought to the surface of the earth as a by-product of global warming. The exogenetic nature of Mourning Ware emphasizes how fired ceramic can easily move back into the geologic record, perhaps even by passing through our bodies as dust.

California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTS
February 22, 2020–August 15, 2021
Curated by Douglas McCulloh.
Artist interview with curator
KPCC’s AirTalk with Larry Mantle appearance

Facing Fire features the work of Noah Berger, Kevin Cooley, Josh Edelson, Samantha Fields, Jeff Frost, Luther Gerlach, Christian Houge, Richard Hutter, Christoph Kapeller, Anna Mayer, Cody Norris, Stuart Palley, Norma I. Quintana, and Justin Sullivan.

An accompanying 124-page catalogue published by Inlandia Institute. The catalogue includes 94 plates presenting work by all the exhibition artists, short essays on each artist, and curatorial texts that explore wildfire as elemental force, metaphor, and harbinger of the future in an increasingly unstable world.

Traveled to:

St. George Museum of Art
St. George, Utah
June 15–August 27, 2022

Jundt Art Museum at Gonzaga University
Spokane, Washington
January 21–May 13, 2023

Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University
Logan, Utah
July 8–December 13, 2023

Jung Center, Houston

2022

Exhibition text by Leslie Dick

Excerpt:
Anna’s mother, Suzanne Mayer (1939-2016), always knitted, afghans and scarfs and sweaters, to give to family and friends, and before she died, she was knitting un-named things, for herself, based on Paul Klee’s work. Sometimes artists copy old master drawings, for example, in order to experience them in another way, a kind of re-enactment. Translating Klee’s paintings into knitting may be an extreme version of this, taking possession of the image and reconstituting it in another material. Nevertheless, it’s wild, inexplicable, hovering in the indeterminate space between hobby activity and art practice, private and public, light-hearted yet serious. It could almost be a whim, a sustained impulse that’s mysterious even to the maker.

In the time after her mother’s death, Anna started making latch-hook wall works based on her mother’s Klee patterns. Here, in the exhibition Pale Clay (Influence and Contagion), she shows them, both front and back, reminding us that the grid is the foundation of their structure. Looking at the backs, we remember how each form is rooted in squares, analog pixels, built out of juxtapositions of single lines of yarn. It is remarkably calm and orderly. Looking at the fronts, we are in another zone, a different experience altogether. It’s a flurry. We want to run our hands over them, feel the fuzzy surface, touch color, like sensing a hand-knitted afghan draped over us, or rows of woolen stitches holding the form of a sock. The tactile dimension is deeply human, close to the body, interconnected. Like a sea anemone, the tendrils of colored yarn reach out to us.

A-B Projects, Los Angeles, CA
September 7 - 29, 2019

Featuring for the first time the Mourning Ware body of work, which explores relationships between personal, planetary, and historical protocols of grieving. Early references for this series include mourning rituals from the Victorian era—a time which witnessed the expansion and domination of the Industrial Revolution. These rituals involved women’s black mourning wear, which was gradually and progressively inflected with lighter patterns over periods of months or years as a means to mark and externalize a transition “through” grief. In Mayer’s exhibition, Seep Fields, discarded synthetic rubber inner tubes are shown in conjunction with a series of manganese-saturated ceramic mourning ware that are embedded with fragments of crushed “fine china” she inherited from her family. As Mayer works with this porcelain, it becomes flecks of dust that are scattered, embedded, dispersed, and blown away. Like ash, these tiny particles will never be completely obliterated. Their material properties reflect Mayer’s experience of mourning and the ways in which behavioral, psychological and environmental patterns are passed from one generation to the next. When it comes to mourning our dramatically changing climate, Mayer observes a distinct lack of public, visible protocol. She uses a sculptural investigation of her personal grief as a corollary to understanding and experiencing our global grief. For Mayer, the personal and the planetary are inextricably connected and one will always seep into the other.

On September 28, Mayer conducted the inaugural State of Ceramics discussion at A-B Projects. Mayer’s presentation and ensuing discussion focused upon the intersection of ceramics and grief, and embodied practices of making. Los Angeles-based artist Julia Haft-Candell introduced and moderated the discussion.

Adjunct Positions, Los Angeles

September 23 - November 10, 2018

For the exhibition, Mayer presents new sculptures in ceramic, plaster, steel, and fire. With special attention to the unique architecture of Adjunct Positions, where two exhibition spaces are stacked on top of each other, Admit, Emit highlights the various ways in which Mayer produces heat--from within her own body and through sculpture and ceramic processes. The gallery's structure frames Mayer's ongoing engagement with burial practices and the excavation of consciousness.

Mayer has produced two portable kiln sculptures for the gallery's garage. Their decorative patterns bring together Victorian mourning practices and present-day destruction by fire. Vessels that house creation and incineration, each kiln is artwork and tool. Keeping them company are photographic self portraits that reveal Mayer's movement between dull(ed) and flush(ed). Her overt self display is with a high degree of vulgarity. She insists on limelight. Her grief reflects losses local and global.

We are devastated by heat. It obliterates. She steams. Emit.

Two branched ceramic sculptures from Mayer's Utteruent series will be fired in the kilns and then covered with lime plaster inside and out. At the conclusion of the show they will be buried on site. The lime will intensify the alkaline Southern California soil, effectively preventing any growth in the garden above the sculptures indefinitely. If life gives you lime, make nothing!

AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles

February 15 - March 10, 2018

Review by Georgia Lassner

As I Say Dying emerges from Mayer’s consideration of archaeologic practices of collection and circulation. Intrigued by the academic who hoards “finds” indefinitely in above-ground storage, Mayer’s sculptural practice exists in the shadow cast by these excesses, while still driven by her embodied experience of every day strife. The central works of the AWHRHWAR exhibition are two sets of replicas of funerary urns that Mayer made in 2017 for family members. She remakes the urns at different scales, each set honoring decisions made in intense grief. The vessels’ variations reflect that they’ve been hand-crafted at different times and through the fog of consciousness.

Joining the replicas in the gallery are hooked rugs from Mayer’s Pale Clay series, made using knitting patterns generated by Mayer’s mother. Their imagery is pulled from various works by Paul Klee, her mother’s favorite painter. Additionally, the inclusion of a networked text + ceramic sculpture (Utteruent -1, 2018) provides an example of how language functions to excavate and bury, and can, at times, allow us to rise, raise, raze, and realize. Produced by compression and then fire, the branched, extruded channels in turn shape what passes through them. Language takes that same shape forming the walls themselves. Words sink up.

Ballroom Marfa
December 9, 2016 - February 5, 2017

Works by Ed Fornieles, Sonja Gerdes, Joel Holmberg, Dwyer Kilcollin, Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen, Anna Mayer, Thomas Mcdonell, and Isaac Resnikoff.

The last of four exhibitions conceived for Arturo Bandini’s year-long installation in Ballroom Marfa's courtyard. Arturo Bandini is a collaborative project by Michael Dopp and Isaac Resnikoff. The installation at Ballroom Marfa occupied a small building designed by Joakim Dahlqvist that fluidly transposes interior and exterior space, mirroring the duo’s promiscuous curatorial sensibility.

We Are Not Only Anything (Left and Right Hands), 2013-2014
bronze, edition of 3
each hand 9” x 5” x 3”

Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND)
Gamble House, Pasadena, CA
October 8 – December 11, 2016

On the Verge of an Image: Considering Marjorie Keller was a group exhibition of sculpture, painting, photography, video, and performance centered on the themes present in the work of under-recognized avant-garde filmmaker Marjorie Keller (1950-1994). Keller’s films were significant in the way they make clear the primacy of bodily engagement as a place from which to critique the status quo. 



Participating artists included renowned international practitioners from Keller’s generation, as well as younger artists, along with a selection of Keller’s work. Artists included Chantal Akerman, Shiva Aliabadi, Vanessa Beecroft, Ashley Carter, Alika Cooper, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Naomi Fisher, Nan Goldin, Trulee Grace Hall, Donna Huanca, Kartemquin Films, Marjorie Keller, Josh Mannis, Anna Mayer, Paul Pescador, Vincent Ramos, Carolee Schneemann, and Jennifer West.



The exhibition was presented at the historic Gamble House in Pasadena, CA, an outstanding example of American Arts and Crafts style architecture. The domestic setting and exploratory nature of navigating throughout the house to discover the works in the exhibition framed the significance of the familial and the familiar in Keller’s work.

Ms Barbers
Los Angeles, CA
July 9 - August 6, 2016
Organized by Josh Mannis
Full exhibition text

We've We're, 2015.
steel, pit fired ceramic, salt, copper, brass, aluminum, plastic, cotton, concrete, fiber, spoon, wicks, straws, foam, text
8x8x7 ft.

Katie Aliprando, Aline Cautis, Charles Irvin, Becky Kolsrud, Tala Madani, Orion Martin, Anna Mayer, and Andy Roche

LET LOVE BURN IN ALL THE LAMPS is an expansion of BE HERE NOW, held at Elephant Gallery in 2011, which featured the work of Becky Kolsrud, Anna Mayer and Andy Roche. Both shows bring together works that have one foot in materialist objecthood, and one foot in existentialist affect: all stand astride "the literal and the figurative"…

Calico, Brooklyn
September 18 - October 24, 2015

Calico Gallery is pleased to present Real Road, an exhibition that brings together the sculptural work of Deirdre McConnell and Anna Mayer. Drawing on her interest in the potential and the limitations of human connection, Deirdre McConnell’s new work places and frames the viewer within the gallery space. Her large-scale woven hex is at the center of the exhibition, its intricate craft creating an architecture that is spacious yet confining. Its center functions both as sign and stage. Gallery visitors are invited to engage with the sculpture as both. In an effort to emphasize certain threads of McConnell’s proposition, Anna Mayer’s contributions to Real Road will surround the stage, looking in on the piece and all who enter it. Mayer’s work often diagrams her own consciousness as she fluctuates between states of soaking up and spellbinding. The textile and ceramic works included in this exhibition use a labor-intensive rendering of objects and people in order to give body to subtle shifts in behavior. Mayer’s attention to what is below the surface acknowledges that consciousness has many blind spots. In this instance she will help illuminate the space below, above, and all around McConnell’s installation.

Real Road emerges from an early collaborative performance in Los Angeles entitled Lavyrinth (2009), for which the two artists engaged in the simple act of one woman braiding another’s hair. The braiding became ritual; the ritual created shape; and the shape formed a spell. The act had long-term consequences for both artists, and Real Road highlights the present-day strategies used by McConnell and Mayer that relate to their collaborative spell-making from years ago. In reference but not deference to the historical trope of “beguiling woman,” the artists offer the gallery as a site for positive self-consciousness. Their faithful acts attract. In a historical moment when greater group consciousness is being urgently called for, Real Road offers an opportunity for a self to have an experience that helps her better relate to a group. The criss-crossing of two artists’ work allows for intertwined revelations. 

The artists invite gallery visitors to hark and come hither, gaze and be known, use bodies and voices, approximate. 

collaboration with Laura Aldridge for Glasgow International
April 4 - 21, 2015

A series of events held in Glasgow between April 4-21, 2014. Three large-scale sculptures resulting from the gatherings were exhibited at Trongate 103, Glasgow. Working from a shared interest in analogue firing techniques, we designed and built a portable ceramics kiln out of oil barrels welded together. The 'double barrel double downdraft kiln' was the focus of three themed firing events in Glasgow and existed as a dreamy, 'twin-derkammer' vessel-sculpture mirroring the two artists who came together to make it. With performative and ceramic contributions from local artists and practitioners, the public gatherings were both ritualistic and casual, and served as a way for the temporary community of the arts festival to engage with larger cross-sections of the city.

Openaries I: Thought forms/Theories of the universe (uttered rather than written) / John Baldessari
 - The Hidden Gardens, Tramway

Openaries II : Vaginas and snakes - 
Glasgow Sculpture Studios

Openaries III: Ever open openings/Ever more open openings/The expanded vessel
 - Woodlands Community Garden

Commissioned by Glasgow International and supported by Outset Scotland, with additional support from Glasgow Life.

Hammer Museum
Jul 13 - 15, 2012
Curated by Ali Subotnik
video of overall exhibition

Land Ownership, Health Care, and Job Security, 2010 - ongoing
sandbags screen-printed with graphics by Albert Culbertson and Indira Burgos, beach sand, barbed wire
Arches made using earthbag building techniques developed by architect Nadir Khalili
one arch = 7' L x 27" D x 33" H

My interest in harnessing fire and alternative firing techniques for ceramics brought me to architect Nadir Khalili’s ceramic houses and his (subsequent) Superadobe building technique that uses stacked earth-filled bags to create extremely stable structures. I’m interested in how Khalili’s clay-related innovations occurred on a large enough scale to impact contemporary disaster relief and utopian building traditions.

Additional photos:
I first exhibited Land Ownership, Health Care, and Job Security arches in a 2010 solo show at Sea and Space Explorations, Los Angeles.

Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA
Anna Mayer & Rosha Yaghmai
October 5 - 26, 2013
Los Angeles Times review

Volitionaries was initially inspired by folklore about Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), who is remembered in part for her attempts to experience French Algeria by dressing as a man to travel freely throughout the country. Complicating turn of the 20th-century colonialism with a commitment to embodied knowledge, Eberhardt was insistent about acknowledging the vulnerability of her position. In preparation for Volitionaries, Mayer and Yaghmai considered and then departed from Eberhardt's narrative and went on to establish a set of shared ideas that formed the initial working premises for the exhibition. Themes include: the importance of firsthand knowledge; a recognition that a body's relationship to where it is physically located is malleable; the way in which language allows us to fantasize andground ourselves; and what can be gleaned from materializing the construction of the self. Mayer and Yaghmai incorporated their respective projections about Eberhardt into an examination of the power of their own wills and how the remoteness of contemporary times can be alleviated and exaggerated by grounded material engagement. As a result of the way the artists set up a collective consciousness from which to generate their individual works for the show, they expanded and contracted away from and towards each other throughout the process, modeling how one can stay conscious and autonomous while still in relation to others. 

Volitionaries situates new sculptures by both Mayer and Yaghmai alongside drawings, photographs, and the constant and welcoming presence of text. The two artists' work will appear in relation to each other throughout the two galleries of Commonwealth & Council, their intertwinement setting the tone for the epistemological dialogue created by the exhibition layout. The artists themselves are eager to experience the conversations created by the work being generated and displayed in this fashion. 

Night Gallery Annex, Los Angeles, CA
October 9 - November 4, 2012
Review of Alika Cooper & Anna Mayer, Frieze