Premio Combat Prize

Bio:Anna Garner( b. 1982) examines assumptions about autonomy, personal space and comfort. Her practice encompasses performance, video and photography. Focusing on physical challenges that invite speculation about the artist’s motivations works center her ability to overcome aggravations, perturbations, or physical trials. Her art has been featured in exhibitions and video festivals both nationally and internationally and her video, Sequential Interactions, received a Bronze Prize at the 2013 Vidoholica Festival in Bulgaria. Garner earned a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA in 2005. She currently lives in Tucson, AZ where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona.Artist Statement: The pieces that are part of Proof and Permutations work through discomfort and physical challenges, considering what it means to seek rites of passage and personal transformation through self-inflicted distresses. I engage myself as an individual in pursuit of understanding, betterment, and accomplishment, examining the states experienced toward these ends. These genuine internal ambitions are skewed toward stagnation in the repetition of compulsions, conflicts, and neuroses that potentially obstruct true progress. The actions I carry out simultaneously help and hinder, assert and take away power.
The video works can be shown individually as single channel pieces or as part of an installation. The installation shows the videos as a triptych on 50” monitors mounted on tripods.