ANNE EASTMAN
— For my first solo show in 2007 I presented a video comprised of short unedited scenes shot in Japan and the US. It was titled, very straightforwardly, here and there, though it wasn’t always apparent what was where. It was shot before iPhones and Instagram were around, on a bulky prosumer canon camera I would carry around with me everywhere. And at the time I had all sorts of problems figuring out how to contextualize it; was it a narrative video, was it chance documentary, how did it relate to still photography, was it exotic or cliche or mundane, how was it to be presented, blah blah blah… people questioned its intentions as it seemed to fall somewhere between casual happenstance and possible orchestration. I remember a very good artist telling me I should re-stage all the scenes to make it more purposeful, he told me it was effective to use a tripod for a more stable image. Footnote, I intentionally shot everything handheld. Then when iPhones made making this kind of videos so much easier, I found it harder to remember to video things… maybe I started to feel that I didn’t need to record things anymore because everyone else was doing it for me. I turned to making other things that explored ideas of slippage. Recently, I realized I’ve accumulated almost enough footage for a second iteration of here and there, but maybe it’s more like now and then. Things are shifting again… when I’m between Japan and NYC, day is night and night is day. Also, as I return again and again to the same places, I feel like I’m seeing them simultaneously as they once were and as they are now. Time is floating. Where clocks were once important objects, now the next generation has no need for clocks… I almost never see someone under the age of 45 wearing a watch. It’s a good time to get into clock collecting.
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Anne Eastman was born in San Francisco in 1973 and raised in Singapore and Tokyo, Japan. She currently lives and work Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA in Cultural Anthropology from Smith College and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art. Past shows include a two-person exhibition with Steven Pippin at Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a two-person exhibition with Tatiana Kronberg at Essex Flowers, solo exhibitions at ATM Gallery in New York, Galerie Lisa Ruyter in Vienna, Austria, Groeflin Maag Gallery in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland, and group exhibitions at numerous galleries in the US and Internationally.