Selected Media
Art Guide InterviewBorn: Gold Coast, Australia.
Lives and works: Los Angeles, USA.
Anna Carey is a visual artist whose practice overlaps both photography and sculpture.
With memory and recall as the only reference of permanency, she interweaves model-making, drawing and photography to create fictive architectural spaces based on the urban environments of cities such as her hometown of the Gold Coast in Queensland, alongside Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Palm Springs.
Throughout her art practice, Carey focuses on architectural spaces as a medium to open up an imaginative realm for the viewer. She employs fragile cardboard constructions, documented in video and photographs to express and access the psychological sensibility beyond manufactured physical façades.
“The colours in which they appear, the skies that light them, their odd details and haunting isolation, appear to her first as an interior picture, and are then reconstructed as simplified three-dimensional models. She then ‘fixes’ them as two-dimensional photographs: not of what was once there and actual, as in the usual holiday snapshot, but as a reality remembered, or significantly mis-remembered and remade. This is the artist’s way of reproducing the process of memory itself. In which time, but also feeling, changes, simplifies, sharpens what was once untidily real and preserves only what is relevant to the emotional charge it carries.
A moment of time lost is recovered, as in Proust, but in a deeper and more enduring form, by allowing it to be flooded with the light not only of time past but of time remembered, and the time between.”
(Australian Author David Malouf writing on Anna Carey’s work, 2014)
Since graduating from Griffith University in Queensland (2010), majoring in Fine Art and Art Theory with Honours (first class), Anna Carey has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally. She has shown consistently with the Queensland Centre for Photography, who took her to Photo LA in 2013, and her work has been curated into various regional galleries and other significant institutional exhibitions. In 2016 Anna was invited to participate in the Auckland Festival of Photography.
Anna Carey’s work was acquired for the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2018. The museum acquired two photographic works titled 517 North Vine Street, Hollywood… Then and 517 North Vine Street, Hollywood… Now from Carey’s 2015 Stardust series. Anna Carey’s works have also been acquired for the collections of Artbank, The Gold Coast City Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Australia, The University of Queensland, and various major corporate and private collections. She was awarded a New Work Grant by the Australia Council for the Arts (2011), and has been a finalist in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award (2013), the Churchie Emerging Art Prize (2011), and the Queensland Regional Art Awards (2011). Anna Carey is currently living and working in Los Angeles and undertaking study towards a PhD via Griffith University.
