In a ‘Proustian’ way, In Search of Rainbows mines those moments of psychological flash and fragmented recall. Anna Carey also embraces the connection between space, colour and memory posed by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard of spaces as psychological resonating chambers, exterior sanctuaries for our interior states; in much the same way that poetry is for daydreams.

In Search of Rainbows is a suite of seven fictional interior spaces modeled in miniature from artist Anna Carey’s poetic conflation of recollection, imagination and reality.

Colour is the decorative, structural and expressive vehicle for the artist. She tells how when she encounters familiar architectural spaces of a particular colour it triggers and associates memories and emotions that flood her new experience.

Each environment of In Search of Rainbows is dedicated to a range of hues within a single colour from the rainbow’s spectrum: red, peachy orange, yellow, green, blue, pink and mauve/purple. The models evolve intuitively as ambiguous spaces saturated with shades and shapes of colour. Interiors are detailed with fanlight windows, sky-lights, ceiling fans, pot plants, stairways, ventilators. Their transitional development is acknowledged in the swatches of colour patched on walls, scattered construction materials and light filtering through fissures of what are as much dreamscapes as architectural designs or prototypes.

Following on from her Stardust series where Google maps was a research tool for locating like-named motels for her models, Anna Carey again accessed the on-line data, this time zooming in, seeking hotspots for colour-mapping and sourcing geo-tagged colour-clusters for potential psychological or political concentrations and associations with place.

The photograph format magnifies aspects of the miniature, reminding the viewer that the transient space is artifice, a constructed object.

The artist shoots in the open, in infinite space in the landscape. She seeks to photograph in an anonymous setting even though only glimpses of landscape can be had. A consistent light level is desired for each body of work and a light that is sympathetic to the colour and ambience and mood of the interior. The artist re-located from Australia to California in 2015.  She took the models for In Search of Rainbows to the desert precinct outside Palm Springs to shoot the series in early 2017 as the light in Venice Beach where she lives did not have the clarity she desires.

Anna Carey aims to reawaken imaginations for the viewer by creating a space of stillness, solitude and contemplation, a place for remembering days, forgetting time, for reverie, for drifting between reality and daydreams induced by colour, space and memory – for rediscovering that which is in yourself.

Barbara Dowse
Curator