Anna Gaskell

Anna Gaskell (born October 22, 1969 ) is an American art photographer and artist from Des Moines, Iowa.

Early life and education Gaskell's mother was an evangelical Christian who brought Anna and her brother along on "wild pilgrimages throughout the Midwest," where they would witness miracles being performed, acts of healing, people speaking in tongues, and other Charismatic Christian practices. She claims that she does not remember anything strange about these acts, "but more a feeling of excitement and a security in the faith that [she] felt from everyone there." Gaskell says that her work revolves around a similar idea of faith, believing the possibility of the impossible and suspension of disbelief. In 1995, she received her MFA from Yale School of Art, studying under Gregory Crewdson.

Career

Gaskell stages all of her scenes, using the style of "narrative photography," wherein each scene exists only to be photographed. Gaskell pioneers a new discourse of contemporary photography where within each of her series, the narrative of her photographs is disrupted, "its fragments functioning like film stills excised from their context but suggesting a missing whole." In a 2002 interview with curator Matthew Drutt of the Menil Collection, Gaskell describes her creative process and the inspiration she draws from other sources in the following way: "The stories and events that I choose to use as jumping-off points are simply that. They are only a part of what goes into the work, and perhaps a useful reference for viewers. [...] Trying to combine fiction, fact, and my own personal mishmash of life into something new is how I make my work. Into all of this, I try to insert a degree of mystery that ensures that the dots may not connect in the same way every time."

1990s

1996

In haunting photographic scenes of preadolescent girls, Gaskell alludes to well-known children's literature, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which can be found in two of her series: wonder (1996–97) and override (1997). Gaskell made her international debut with the twenty photograph series, wonder (1996–97), the first series Gaskell created after receiving her MFA at Yale University School of Art. wonder, which draws the viewer in with stained-glass coloration intensified by lamination, Through the use of different sized photographs, Gaskell displays an instability in Alice by referring to the character's growth spurts and shrinking spells. This series features young girls alone in a gothic mansion, creating a sense of dread and underlying sexual intrigue that takes its impetus from the tale of a young woman forced to hide beneath animal skins to hide from the matrimonial desires of her father. The name of the series is drawn from the children's game hide-and-seek, the dual personality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the literal skin, or hide, that creates a boundary between the inside and the outside, the self and the other.

2007

In her video, Acting Lessons, Gaskell plays the protagonist, an actress who is performing a monologue and is continuously interrupted by an acting coach off screen. In this piece, Gaskell adopts "a mundane living room as the setting for her portrayal of emotional power struggles." Sally Salt says…, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne Anna Gaskell, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden

2000 by proxy, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy Resemblance, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York Remarkable Places, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne Future's Eve, New Langton Arts, San Francisco

2002 Half Life, The Menil Collection, Houston; White Cube, London Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Le studio, Yvon Lambert, Paris

2003 Anagram, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

2004 Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York At Sixes and Sevens, Yvon Lambert, Paris

2005 1991, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan Erasers, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

2007 Paint Your Own Pictures, Yvon Lambert, New York Still Life, Vizcaya Museum and Garden, Miami Erasers, The Box, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio

2009 Replayground, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

2013 Penguin, Yvon Lambert, Paris The Romantic Exiles, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Select group exhibitions 1998 Sightings, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London Moving Pictures, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2012 Exquisite Corpses. Drawings and Configuration, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Reception Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times in 2004, described Gaskell as an established "maker of spooky, tension-filled feminine fictions", her work recalling Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In Glueck's view, Gaskell's method is "to create a narrative expectation without fulfilling it", each picture hinting at a situation or story, provoking the viewer to speculate. Glueck does not necessarily approve of this, calling the process of challenging the viewer to make a story "do[ing] the artist's work".

Robert Mahoney, reviewing Gaskell's first exhibition of color photographs in 1997, calls the show a "masquerade" with a pair of "pretty twins" playing at Alice in Wonderland in blue pinafores, white tights and "black Mary Jane shoes". Mahoney calls this an intense search for identity, observing that the use of twins brings out the "mirror-like clarity" of Alice's dream journey. In his view, the blue and white coloration recalls the Virgin Mary, while the use of young women to represent "prepubescent girls" brings sexuality into the images.

Christopher Mooney, writing for ArtReview in 2014, reviews an exhibition in Paris of Gaskell's photographs alongside her ex-partner Douglas Gordon's "wall, floor, and corner works". Mooney calls it a swan song, the exhibition featuring swan taxidermy in "many" of Gordon's works, and a Bolshoi ballet prima ballerina, Svetlana Lunkina, who "danc[es] across Gaskell's screens". Mooney finds Lunkina the strongest element in the show, Gaskell's photographs displaying her as both graceful and "affecting".

Awards Citigroup Private Bank Photography Prize (2000). Nancy Graves Foundation Grant (2002). Des Moines Art Center Artists Residency, Des Moines (2005) KunstFilmBiennale, Cologne, best film in the art category: Erasers (2005) NYFA Grant (2010) Artslink Grant (2010) Bohen Foundation Grant (2010) Recollects Residency, Paris (2011)