Creative Connections: New Work by Anne Labovitz
May 3rd - June 6th
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I examine the importance of human interaction and its visual embodiment. My work is often about engaging people across cultural and geographical boundaries, reflecting ideas of generosity, friendship, community building, and emotional exchange. Color, texture, and installation all combine to create a shared space of connection and contemplation. I believe color is a life force.
“Creative Connections” is intentionally site-specific, responding to the place of Art In Motion, including the natural environment and the ideas and people who inhabit the venue, the exhibition gallery with it’s vast and expansive ceilings, the light that streams into the space, and of course my amazing students. Over the course of the last six months, I facilitated a collaborative and experimental internship space for 18 local high-school age students at Art in Motion. During this time, I guided discussion, critique, brainstorming techniques, collaboration, creative problem solving, and interdisciplinary art making with the ultimate goal of producing work for an art exhibition. Students showed their work in April and this show reflects the concurrent work I made.
The source material for “Creative Connections” comes, in part, from these discussions. I was fortunate enough to work with every one of the 18 students, who were each inspiring in different ways. They are strong individuals, creative artists, and resilient people with a vulnerability and hope for the future that I find inspiring. The rich dialogue we shared and the subtext of words and actions is something I carried with me between meetings. Because of the lockdown, the experience of creating community online was more intense and intentional for each participant and myself. It is this tender feeling of tangential connection that I share in my works. In the intensely explored themes, I show our vulnerability and determination. And this connection is what I found most powerful in our work.
Importantly, “Creative Connections” is also site-specific in relation to materials, installation, and responsiveness to the physicality of the space. For a number of years, I have been taking my painting practice off the wall and into the physical space and this installation is an extension. This body of work specifically examines place, space, and light while exploring sculpture. I wanted to create a visceral and emotional place for viewers. Color goes beyond language in these large-scale works, which transform the space in which it is viewed. For Art in Motion, I’ve dramatically hung the work from the 20-foot ceiling. I intentionally created double-sided artworks and hung them sculpturally in the space. I created new sculptural scrolls that cascade down, forming 3D shapes and visual expressions. Elements of the building, such as the fans, the garage door, and human movement will activate the sculptural scrolls, allowing for a waving of materiality. The works are made of Tyvek, a special material that is extremely light and moves easily. The voluptousness is exacerbated by the dramatic high ceiling hang. The use of the full vertical space recalls a forest or waterfall.
This work is conceptually connected to much of my work in 2020-2021, which includes ideas about travel, isolation, solitude, and longing. I’m interested in how physical movement can connote conceptual or psychological movement. How do we shift our thinking in a contemporary world? Responding to today’s world, this work investigates themes loneliness and disconnection by activating color and light in large-scale work. By working with other humans, and within this local context, my aim is to create creative connections.
ANNE LABOVITZ BIOGRAPHY
(b. Duluth, Minnesota) lives and works in St. Paul, MN. Responding to today’s world, Labovitz makes artwork that challenges isolation, loneliness and disconnection by activating color and light in large-scale work. Local context and creating connections with others is embodied in her creative process and public interventions.
Current projects include: Two large-scale permanent public mosaic artworks at the MSP Airport (2021), 122 Conversations currently installed in MSP airport Terminal 2 (2019- 2022), the Belgrade Art Residency, Serbia (2021), Turn Up the Turn Out, a cohort of 22 artists dedicated to the promotion of voting and voting registration in Minnesota (2020), Response (2020), a body of new works responding to COVID 2020 isolation, an Outdoor fence installation in Berlin, Germany (June 2021), a site-specific participatory public art commission at the Redleaf Center For Family Healing (2021), I Love You Institute, a community-based art project, supported by a Springboard for the Arts community grant, and solo exhibitions at Art In Motion, Holdingford (2021), Concordia St Paul (2021), Minnesota Marine Art Museum (2022), and Rochester Art Center (2023).
Previous exhibitions include: University of Raparin, Rania, Iraqi Kurdistan; Växjö Kunsthall, Växjö, Sweden; Petrozavodsk City Exhibition Hall, Petrozavodsk, Russia; Isumi City Hall, Isumi City, Japan; Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay, Canada; Tweed Museum, Duluth, MN; Athenaeum in La Jolla, CA; MSP Terminal 2, Minneapolis, MN; MSP Terminal 1, Minneapolis, MN; Crary Art Gallery, Warren, PA; Burnet Gallery, Le Méridien Chambers in Minneapolis; Talgut die Schönen, in Kunste, Germany; and the Chapman Art Center at Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, NY.
Labovitz’s artwork can be found in the following public collections: Minneapolis/St Paul Airport Collection; Frederick R Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St Paul; The Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth; The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA; Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul; International Gallery of Portrait, in Bosnia-Herzegovina; Växjö Kommun, City of Vaxjo, Sweden; Isumi City Offices, Isumi City Japan; University of Raparin, Rania Iraqi Kurdistan; and City of Petrozavodsk, Petrozavodsk, Russia.
As part of her praxis, Labovitz connect to communities through activism, anti-racism, and public co-creation. She was a participant in the initial cohort of the Woke Coach, founding member of Racial Equity Committee at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and on the steering committee of Turn up the Turn Out. Her current long-term social practice project is the I Love You Institute, an artist-led site-specific project urgently working with communities to address today’s world creatively. It combines art-making, social justice, radical kindness, and relational listening to normalize, saying “I Love You” as an alternative to division and conflict.
Anne Labovitz Introduces the High School Arts Apprenticeship
