Takeover #209 Annie Riga
Annie Riga: Instagram / Website
#209 (06/06 - 10/06, 2022) written by Esther van Zoelen
A borderline state of reality and fiction created through painterly sculptures and sculptural paintings. Annie makes ceramics that seem to express ordinary objects, animals and plants, but she transforms them into something uncanny. For example, recently she has been creating a series of hybrid human-animals. These sculptures are a way for her to build her own fictional characters that are in-between creatures; connecting to nature, mythology and science fiction.
For her, fiction is the place to think about reality as a more open and inclusive world, which she also expresses with large-scale paintings. Organic materials are often merged with scientific illustrations of nature and then painted quickly and intuitively. When the paintings are hanging from the ceiling, one can look through the holes in them into the painting-layers behind them and experience wilderness by their explicit spatiality. The transition between making swiftly painted layers that become sculptures in space and the focused attention while sculpting clay is liberating for Annie. Sometimes these two mediums become even more intertwined when she paints on the ceramics. While the sculptures often are more figurative and the paintings more abstract, they are still connected. They represent different phases and temporalities of the same world, coming from the same place.
“The relationship with the subconscious in the work – either through the means of creating these fantastical characters or through using impulsive gestures that create a topography kind of like a dream – is representing the internal space. They are both a reflection of that.”
Eco-philosophy and relational ontologies have long been sources of inspiration for her, as are shamanic transformations of indigenous communities. Although she likes to avoid the word ‘spiritual’, she still thinks her work is related to it, since art for her is a way to look into herself and portray her inner connectedness to the world. Art is a ritualistic process in which the outcome is not entirely certain and often surprising. Annie wishes for those who view her work to be inspired by her personal externalization of ideas and think of their own relationships to the world.
“Everything that is a bit imaginary or dreamlike is considered as something unrealistic. For me, this question of what is real and what is not, and how many channels can exist is really interesting.”
During lockdown people could barely leave their homes, which for Annie resulted in various cardboard shipping boxes in her home. She decided to use them as an alternative for pedestals for her ceramics in an installation, since she found traditional pedestals to be unsuitable for her work. The image of Greek creatures standing on capitalist consumerist objects created an interesting paradox for her. This also relates to Annie’s vision on the value of art. She is not interested in high end, super sleek, clean white walls and aesthetic-art. She also never thought of her art as a product to sell. She much prefers creating things that are all over the place, using material such as used objects and trash, hereby going against conventional ideas of what art is made of.
Both Annie’s paintings and sculptures will be shown during her takeover. She will talk about philosophy and other thoughts, about the process of working and she will show work she made just before and just after graduating from her masters at AKV St Joost Den Bosch in 2020.
For her, fiction is the place to think about reality as a more open and inclusive world, which she also expresses with large-scale paintings. Organic materials are often merged with scientific illustrations of nature and then painted quickly and intuitively. When the paintings are hanging from the ceiling, one can look through the holes in them into the painting-layers behind them and experience wilderness by their explicit spatiality. The transition between making swiftly painted layers that become sculptures in space and the focused attention while sculpting clay is liberating for Annie. Sometimes these two mediums become even more intertwined when she paints on the ceramics. While the sculptures often are more figurative and the paintings more abstract, they are still connected. They represent different phases and temporalities of the same world, coming from the same place.
“The relationship with the subconscious in the work – either through the means of creating these fantastical characters or through using impulsive gestures that create a topography kind of like a dream – is representing the internal space. They are both a reflection of that.”
Eco-philosophy and relational ontologies have long been sources of inspiration for her, as are shamanic transformations of indigenous communities. Although she likes to avoid the word ‘spiritual’, she still thinks her work is related to it, since art for her is a way to look into herself and portray her inner connectedness to the world. Art is a ritualistic process in which the outcome is not entirely certain and often surprising. Annie wishes for those who view her work to be inspired by her personal externalization of ideas and think of their own relationships to the world.
“Everything that is a bit imaginary or dreamlike is considered as something unrealistic. For me, this question of what is real and what is not, and how many channels can exist is really interesting.”
During lockdown people could barely leave their homes, which for Annie resulted in various cardboard shipping boxes in her home. She decided to use them as an alternative for pedestals for her ceramics in an installation, since she found traditional pedestals to be unsuitable for her work. The image of Greek creatures standing on capitalist consumerist objects created an interesting paradox for her. This also relates to Annie’s vision on the value of art. She is not interested in high end, super sleek, clean white walls and aesthetic-art. She also never thought of her art as a product to sell. She much prefers creating things that are all over the place, using material such as used objects and trash, hereby going against conventional ideas of what art is made of.
Both Annie’s paintings and sculptures will be shown during her takeover. She will talk about philosophy and other thoughts, about the process of working and she will show work she made just before and just after graduating from her masters at AKV St Joost Den Bosch in 2020.