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About the Project:
In Mexico (exvoto)
In Mexico (exvoto) is a digitally created computer project, begun on a trip I took with friends to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2003. I was immediately drawn to the icons, altars, and images of the Virgin Mary seen everywhere. It wasn't just the prevalence of the icons that fascinated me, but also the particular choice of Mary, a sacred female, and people's evident veneration of her. I was struck with the way signs of spiritual life were seamlessly integrated into the fabric of Mexican culture.In this series, I use digital manipulation of the image to draw attention to the way the icon is nonchalantly incorporated into common settings: everybody has an altar; it's the norm. I selected a tiny part of the photograph and enlarged it to enhance, through the print's pixilated surface, the icon's integration into the space surrounding it. Other than that, all the images are straight photographs taken with a digital camera.
In past bodies of work, I have borrowed traditional iconic forms, such as Renaissance panel paintings or Byzantine mosaics, to assign reverence to objects of domestic labor, things like a darning egg or a ball of lint, idealizing the real object with a painted illusionist backdrop (see Still Life Constructions). On this trip, my focus shifted to the subject of devotion, in the representations of the Virgin Mary, an ideal, and also, as you may view in Oaxaca, to the producers of domestic labor, the very real women of Mexico.
I spent a day alone in Mexico City to see Our Lady of Guadalupe, the famous divinely painted tilma of Saint Juan Diego. In the afternoon, I went to Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo's Blue House, where, via their large collection, I discovered, exvotos, little folk art paintings on tin. These show someone praying to a saint in gratitude for their help through a particular crisis. Though the paintings are small, each one includes an image of the saint, the supplicant, a depiction of the event, and the actual words of the thankful message. These public expressions of gratitude for assistance with private needs greatly inspired me. I see this project as my own personal exvoto.
About the Artist:
Ann Hunt Currier was born in Bay Shore, New York, in 1956, one of seven children, and has been a fine art color photographer since she received her BFA from Purchase College in 1980. She earned an MFA in Creative Art from Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1989. She has exhibited her work at a number of venues, most notably at the Neuberger Museum in a show titled Working/Still, in a three-person show at Kendall Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles. In 2002, a solo exhibit at Gallery West of Suffolk County Community College featured her Still Life Constructions and her April-Isolated series.
In 1995, she had a one-person exhibit of 14 photographs from her Twenty-Two Views from my Window One Winter at Windows Above the Circle Gallery of New York Institute of Technology. The series and its title inspired composer Vito Ricci to write a piano work comprising 14 pieces, one for each photograph in the installation. In 1996, the images were displayed at a performance of his work given at the Knitting Factory in New York City.
A teacher of fine art and photography at LaGuardia High School in New York City since 1984, Currier established the photography program there and continues to develop and expand it, most recently with the inclusion of digital image making. In addition to teaching at the Fame school, she is an adjunct lecturer in photography at Brooklyn College and has taught and lectured about her work at the Maine Photographic Workshops.
A recipient of many awards and grants, Currier is a 1995 Fellow in Photography of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2002, she was awarded a commission for a public art project for Kings County Hospital Center, in Brooklyn. for which she created photographic assemblages. combining her own images with historic photographs of the hospital. These were displayed and illuminated in an installation of light boxes.
Her photographic work has undergone a shift in content away from an internal landscape to a more documentary perspective and a shift in media to experiments with digital image making. Her first extensive project involved her work with photographs taken in Oaxaca, Mexico. That trip sparked an interest in Latin American culture, primarily religious and craft-making practices. She is a 2003 recipient of a Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Peru. A solo exhibition in 2004 at the LaGuardia Gallery of LaGuardia High School featured the photographs taken on that trip: a digital project showing weaving traditions from the highlands of Peru. In this work, she continued to focus on the artifacts and products of domestic labor-and the people who perform it.
She lives with her husband, Douglas, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and on Hooper Island in Maryland; they have two daughters, Joanna, born in 1981, and Katherine, born in 1993.
Welcome to my site.
The website contains images of photographs I have made; the earliest are from 1979. It is arranged chronologically by project starting with my current work.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at ann@annhuntcurrier.com.
Thank you for looking; it is a pleasure to share with you my online portfolio.
- Ann