Anna Plesset: Various Records

PATRON is proud to announce our first solo presentation of Brooklyn based artist, Anna Plesset. The exhibition titled, Various Records will open with a reception for the artist on Saturday, March 23rd from 5-8PM and continue through May 4, 2019.

Using painting, drawing, sculpture, and other media, my work engages personal and shared histories to examine how knowledge, memory, and history are constructed and mediated. While research-based and conceptually driven, my work is grounded in traditional painting techniques. In particular, the history of trompe l’oeil painting influences me in its capacity to raise questions about our perception of culture and society through the illusionistic representation of quotidian objects. Drawing on this legacy through multiple lenses—whether focused on the absence of women from the art historical canon or the integration of trauma into everyday life—my work explores historical narratives complicated by erasure, translation, geography, and time. 

My current project, 'Various Records,' utilizes a variety of approaches including video, trompe l’oeil painting, drawing, and sculpture to look at the physical and psychological relationships between war, trauma, suffering and everyday life through multiple records: a film my Jewish grandfather made while serving as an army psychiatrist during World War II, the record of my own journey retracing his path through Europe using the film as my guide, and the familiar narrative of World War II constructed by institutions, books, and other media. 

All of my work is driven by my deep interest in overlooked or lesser-known narratives that exist within primary accounts of the past, and to which I have physical and psychological connections. The overlap between my research subjects and my own physical activities with respect to that research is where my work functions, offering a reconsideration of our perception of the past and its construction.

- Anna Plesset