(b. 1994) Ana is an artist and educator currently based out of central Illinois. She received her MFA in Painting + Drawing from the University of Notre Dame in 2021.
I am an artist and educator based in the Midwest, born of and shaped by the distinctive ecological character of Central Illinois: the buggy, golden prairie; the Illinois River Valley, beaches littered with rocks, carp bones, and freshwater mussels; the region’s vast tracts of corn and soybean fields; and forests rich with singing cicadas in the summertime, snowy, dark, and stripped in the winter. My psyche is steeped in the dreamlike highway imageries I take in on my weekly commutes from Peoria to Galesburg; visions of roadkill scattered beneath baroque clouds, construction cones and blinking speed radars, a distant storm, grain silos framing the flat road as it recedes ever into oblivion. There is no shortage of beauty and horror from which to pull—and though my work hardly depicts (at least, in any explicit sense) familiar Midwestern scenes of a Casey’s gas station or a Menards parking lot dissonantly cut against a magnificent autumn sky—it is no less informed by these spaces, sites, and moods. I seek out, each and every day, the secret, alien poetry of those deeply unfamiliar worlds nestled within my semi-rural, agricultural milieu.
With an interest in speculative futures, plants, technology, and the nonhuman more broadly, my work contemplates and confronts the premise of a world-without-us. My paintings and drawings serve as visualizations of posthuman worldscapes—spheres of simultaneity, where deep pasts and distant futures fuse. These are worlds in which survival is precarious, ongoing; a world of clinging, growth, mutation, and encounter.
Melding familiar referents from nature (sometimes those close to home, but often exotic plants and creatures) with imagined forms and dramatic colorscapes, my paintings and drawings depict a defamiliarized earth, a world of deep and necessary interconnection, a world that resists our ability to fully recognize it … and yet that we might relate to in a visceral, embodied, subconscious way. Through an illusionistic approach to image-making, I attempt to refocus attention on the complexity of the nonhuman agencies all around us, both those that we recognize, and those that exceed our capacity to perceive.
A tightly rendered painting language encourages the eye to slow down, look closely, and inspect the smallest of details: to appreciate those enchanting, hidden worlds within worlds. I engage a visual language of mystery and allure (the sensual, luminous, and otherworldly) to create an hypnotic encounter between painting and viewer. With an interest in narrative world-building, I play with cuts and ruptures in the pictorial space, shaped portals and silhouettes, and the repetition of forms and rhythms across my body of work to further trouble the clear boundary between the viewer’s environment and the illusionistic space of the paintings.
Ana V. Fleming 