Ann Stoddard

FISH SOUP (detail)
video projection installation; 2006
FISH SOUP (video projection installation) uses random juxtapositions to explore the poisoning of the Ohio River Valley: interviews, wall text, conceptual art, and interactivity. Juxtaposed wall projections prompt questions: factory smoke blowing on, for example, fresh bok choi in a local outdoor farm market; residents testifying about toxic emissions by chemical factories and high cancer rates; texts warning tap water and local fish are carcinogenic. Projectors silhouette viewers within thee industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley’s “polymer alliance zone.”

Ann Stoddard
Adelphi, Maryland, USA

STATEMENT

My interdisciplinary art practice includes montage, reinscription, site specific, interactive, socially engaged art/technologies, including drawing-based video animation; reframing prompts viewer empathy: video-installation-social sculptures; viewer-created-montage-outdoor-signage; quad-screen with video delay/reframing/context.

I devised new approaches to Multi-Channel Video Installations:
• Quad-screen electronic installations: quad-switcher, video dvd’s, live CCTV with TIVO delay. Examples: interactive video installation, “home.land.security” Interactivelive-delayed-video of the viewer (TIVO), video-text, recorded video, performance
• Directing, recording and editing videos exploring implicit bias, i.e. ethnic bias, “Seeing Things, Headscarf”; and racial bias, “Seeing Things, Personal Devices”
• 4-Channel video juxtaposes live, delayed-video of viewer & locally recorded video: Random juxtapositions make connections that, for example, undermine implicit biases, raise doubts, prompt empathy.
• Incorporate viewer’s shadows & random juxtapositions in multichannel video wall-projection installations: FISH SOUP, Tall Stack Theory. My videos & site-specific installations engage viewers with context (social, racial, ethnic), expand roles of viewer-witness:
WAVE (water, board) site installation dealing with waterboarding, combined flag context with live- and recorded video, missing torture memos site context.
• Interactive Video Surveillance Installations appropriate public space
context ex. CCY+TV surveillance, waiting rooms, service windows, sign-in registration, orientation, etc.
• Reinscription display installations:
o Permanent transparent outdoor signage ‘Viewer created montage’ reinscription signage: Outdoor signage Installations: Historical Landscape Reinscription via Viewer-Created-Montage transparent signage, for example, “Genealogy of Towers, Re-Searching the American Landscape”
o “The Political Economy of Side Chairs” reinscribes reproduction chairs and earth with the economic statistics of enslaved people and stolen land via screen-printed panels.
o “Bared Threads” incorporates reverse English/Arabic labeling–hand embroidery on wedding veil, nun’s veil, hijabs.

BIO

Ann Stoddard is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation, video, sculpture, site-work, drawing, printmaking. A member of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, Stoddard’s solo shows include: “ConcealedCarryLand” (2019) at Tuttle Gallery, Baltimore; “Seeing Things” (2017) at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn; “Seeing Things” (2016) part of the 39th Street Gallery Pop-Up in Maryland; “WAVE (water, board)” (2009) at PASS Gallery in Washington, DC; “REGISTRATION” (2007) at the Radford University Museum; “Fish Soup” (2006) at Ohio_University’s Siegfried Gallery; “WAITING ROOM” (2003) at School 33 Art Center in Baltimore; “Surveilling Utopia” (2003) at the District of Columbia Art Center.

Stoddard’s juried/invitational-group-exhibitions include: “Symbiotic Presence” (2020) at the Brentwood Art Exchange Gallery; A.I.R. Gallery National Members Exhibitions (2016 through 2021); “Art Against Gun Violence” (2018) in Washington, DC; “UpRooted” (2018) and “Create/Change” (2017) at Hillyer Art Space in Washington, DC; “Art of Engagement” (2017) at Touchstone Gallery in Washington, DC; “The Personal is Political is Personal” (2016) at 440 Gallery in Brooklyn; “Art as Politics” (2016) at Touchstone Gallery in Washington, DC; “Implicit-Bias” (2015) at Smith Center in Washington, DC; “Zeitgeist UnderSurveillance” (2008) at Nevin Kelly Gallery in Washington, DC; “Accelerating Sequences” (2005) at MOCA GA; Annual Juried Exhibition at COCA in Seattle; ”From Your House to Our House” (2002) at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; “2002 Biennial” at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Virginia; “2002 Biennial” at Lemmerman Gallery at New Jersey City University; “Culture of Class” (2000) at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Ann Stoddard’s awards include: 2021 Artist’s Grant, Maryland State Arts Council; 2020 Alternate Roots Professional Development Grant; 2019 Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Award; 2019 Independent Artist Award. Artist Fellowship 2017 (Prince George’s County (Maryland) Arts Council); Juror’s Award,“Art as Politics” (2016) Touchstone Gallery, Washington, DC; 1st Prize 2015 MNCPPC Juried Exhibition “N/ever Again” at Harmony Hall Art Center in Maryland; Chairman’s Award, 2002 Biennial at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Virginia. Stoddard’s exhibitions have been reviewed by newspapers including The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Athens News Review, The Milwaukee Sentinel; and by national art journals including Sculpture Magazine and Afterimage Magazine.

Stoddard has taught art full-time at Ohio University and New Jersey City University, and served as a visiting artist at Cal Arts and Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Stoddard is an adjunct art faculty at Montgomery College and Prince George’s Community College. She reviews art for Afterimage Magazine; The New Art Examiner. Stoddard’s academics include: graduate program at Columbia University, MFA from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, BA from Connecticut College, including post-graduate coursework at the Naropa Institute in novel-writing, poetry, performance, dance.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.annstoddard.net

IMAGES

The Political Economy of Side Chairs, Reinscription Site Installation
10’x8’x8′; printed acrylic panels, red clay (site), reproduction Queen Anne chairs; 2000
The Political Economy of Side Chairs (detail)
10’x8’x8′; printed acrylic panels, red clay (site), reproduction Queen Anne chairs; 2000.
The Political Economy of Side Chairs (reinscription site installation) reframes American Colonial history via economic statistics (tobacco/enslaved workers/cheap land), a 6’x7’ display case, & freshly dug clay (dug on site). Queen Anne chairs (reproductions) are surrounded by clear panels screen-printed with devastating graphs, data [“Land and Slave prices in Chesapeake, 1720-1775”]. The 18th c. U.S. economy that made mahogany chairs affordable for upper class, Southern whites now makes them look like evidence of slavery and stolen land. The panels float an inch above the red clay base.
Genealogy of Towers, ReSearching the American Colonial Landscape (installation view: Organization of American States Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC)
7’6″x6′; viewer-created montage, reinscription signage installation reframing the Washington Monument. Transparent screen-printed acrylic panel of archival photo of “old slave tower”, i.e., Calvert Plantation slave quarter; welded steel signage; 1997