Ann Diener’s drawings and installations are multi-layered narratives, which investigate the social and political ramifications of the built environment. Referring to land, culture, time and memory, the works move beyond geography to engage with the issues of science, social class, migration and the anthropological layers of place.
On view are primarily large-scale drawings which, at a glance, are high energy, high contrast, graphic and unrelenting. Despite the obvious boldness, the frenzy is controlled and orchestrated. The draftsmanship is precise, clean and obsessive. After the first awe of encountering Diener’s work, the intimacy of detail rewards, parts exuding that initial sense of energy yet simultaneously the essence of stillness. Diener retains the white of the paper in every piece and it plays an important role. As the work is presented unfamed, the white flows onto the gallery walls. The spatial depth is fractured but limited and without glass or plexi or framed borders, the distance between the viewer and delicate graphite is eliminated. Stepping up close, there are layers and layers to discover beyond pencil lines: inks and shards from prints, drawings within drawing, suggestions of flora, pathways, grandiose architecture, something you might find at a rodeo or on your kitchen table.
Though you may never get past the visual glory of the work, the details begin to hint at the conceptual underpinnings and themes Diener explores: history, geography and the politics of space. “The Power of Place” has tremendous significance to all of us in our communities, as world citizens, as beneficiaries of earlier land-grabs. Richly historical and yet utterly contemporary, place IS power, defined in a myriad of ways personal and political.
Constance M. Kocs, Gallery Director, Pierce College Art Gallery
A New Place, 2022, five panels each 60 x 22 in., ink on Mylar
Through drawing, Ann Diener maps the layered history of place, charting ways that spaces are changed over time by those who inhabit them. While space is determined by nature and delineation of physical dimensions, place is crafted and reflects the personal and unique nature of the subjective human experience. The drawings in the Mandarin Plaza exhibit are a build-ups of objects, architecture, natural and art history, portraiture and patterning that she overlaps, combines and re-makes. One form annexes and informs the next while large swaths of negative space remain unclaimed. Connections arise among the various unrelated sources until a story unfolds, one that reflects the histories of its inhabitants.
On the surface, Genoa has all the trappings of a modern port city; however, upon closer examination, vestiges of its history as a medieval merchant-pirate superpower slowly reveal themselves. over the period of a year, i made a series of drawings that map the layered history and diverse inhabitants of a place henry James once described as “the crookedest and most incoherent of cities.” consciously unmoored from a linear narrative, the work addresses how successive occupants interacted with and “overdrew” the city, creating their own ephemeral place—existing for a moment only to be drawn over again and again. the portrait reflects the complex dimensionality of place by evoking time periods, life style, class, and social values through a constructed world of multiple vantage points.
For the last ten years, Ann Diener has been mapping the layered history of the places she knows best in her large-scale drawings: rst, the transformed Ventura farmland of her childhood and, more recently, the sprawl of Los Angeles as demarcated by its fraught aqueduct. However, Diener’s drawings are not road atlases (nor GPS devices) plotted by compass coordinates, but a local’s hand drawn directions delineated by memory’s landmarks. Perhaps even more accurately, her drawings are stratigraphic contexts—careful records of archeological excavations. Not only geographic, but also temporal, they chart the way a location is inevitably changed by its inhabitants over many generations creating what the artist calls a “hybrid space”.
For her first museum project, artist Ann Diener has translated her dynamic works on paper and canvas into a massive drawing on the walls of the University Art Museum’s Nachman Gallery. Diener, known for her large compositions which combine abstraction and guration, drew upon her commanding use of scale to tackle the voluminous space of the gallery. In Ascent (2010) Diener has created a looming bower representing the coalescence of her previous works that explored changes wrought in the southern California landscape and her more recent interest in the story of the Tower of Babel.
The concept of “growth” speaks to the many layers of Ann Diener’s newest body of work. It aptly describes her development as an artist as she dives deeper into her subject matter. She continues to challenge herself by increasing scale, complicating the perspective, and growing her vocabulary to express an intricate relationship to the land and nature on a personal and universal level. The swirling velocity of these images intertwines observations of the “natural” world as she sees it today with recollections of her past. She weaves in the energy of her memories in an attempt to reconcile what was to the current landscape that is-the rural farmland of her youth to the suburban industrial agricultural industry of the present.
Ann Diener’s current drawings focus on both natural and man-made fences and borders, a time-honored subject in traditional landscape painting dating back to the work of English luminaries, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) and John Constable (1776-1837). Both artists illustrated the sweeping effects of the enclosures movement on the topography of the landed economy at the end of the eighteenth century as the rural landscape was transformed from unmarked and undivided common land owned and used by all, to the fenced-in, exclusive private property of the emerging upper middle classes. The resultant image of the landscape as a ‘patchwork quilt’ — most noticeable, of course, from the air — has come to define all subsequent representations of the genre, so that once contrived images of hedgerows and subdivisions have become ‘naturalized’ to create their own form of cubistic beauty.