Anne Austin Pearce creates sensual, abstract paintings that describe the amorphous membrane between the banal moments of life and what she describes as “the holistic sensation of pleasure than can be derived from the awe of being.”
Pearce grew up listening to exotic bedtime tales from her father who was born in Kenya. These stories of foreign landscapes she could not yet fathom planted a seed of wanderlust that still informs her practice.
Her work has evolved greatly in the last three years following a 15 month sabbatical from her position as a full time Professor of Art and Director of the Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University. Throughout this, her longest period of uninterrupted studio time, Pearce visited Mexico, Mauritius, Malaysia, Wyoming and France. But while these diverse sites could envelop a lifetime of study, she considers each place she visits to be its own geographical room; a provisional intimate space forged within a foreign place.
The work created in each locale is revisited between trips when she nestles once again in her native Kansas City. This process fosters a cycle of energy that carries each city into the next while her daydreams serve as an interim train car gently carrying her to the next geographical room. The result is a disparate yet unified body of work all singularly informed by place, but cross pollinated within the totality of her travels.
Her series Mauritian Dogs Have Balls is a reflection on her primal experience of observing her island landscape. The work, rooted in pools of deep charcoal bleeding into hints of magenta and red, reflects an awestruck moment when a pack of wild dogs converged with rainbows, flowering trees, trash, and colorful clothing. Pearce returned home and prepared to drape her island daydreams over the winter landscape of her Wyoming residency.
The Wyoming River Rock series has a muted color palette in comparison to the works born in tropical locales, but in this geographical room Pearce found herself drawn to the starkness of isolated winter. Her muse morphed from moist greenery to hard winter soil where she found herself “daydreaming about the sediment of all things that have lived and died, and lived and died.” A visual narrative emerged as she empathized with the ancestry of flora and fauna not just of Wyoming, but all her geographical rooms.
Using color and form to translate her encyclopedia of visual references, Pearce distills the overwhelming sensory experience of exploring a foreign place down to the minutia: the rippled curl of a leaf’s edge, chunky stalks of bamboo, a family of ants carrying a dragonfly carcass.
In her practice, Pearce is the architect of physical places, as well as the imagined spaces she's harbored since childhood. In a dazzling array of transparent pools of ink, sprays of fanning color, tethers of small flecks, and iridescent rivers dispersing into conduits akin to blood rushing through veins, or tides swallowing sand before receding into a limitless sea, Pearce voices indescribable moments of pause and ecstasy.
– Halcombe Miller