About Anna Ayeroff

Anna Ayeroff is an artist and art educator based in Los Angeles. She works primarily in sculpture, photography and film, using her art practice as a research tool. Ayeroff builds imagined perfect worlds, performs rituals of place making and enacts a search for utopia through her work.

When she is not on the road searching for perfect places, her project, "a space (for art)", an art education mentorship program for children and teens based in her studio, is her method for moving mountains. Her work has been included in several exhibitions in Los Angeles and throughout the United States.

My paternal grandfather was born in 1911, in Clarion, Utah, a small farm colony developed by a group of Jewish immigrants who came from New York City. They wanted to live off of the land. They wanted to make a different kind of life than the ghetto life they had always known. They were radicals. The colony failed after a few short years.

My practice starts with a story. Clarion locates me in a lineage. And my practice is built from that place. People searching for a better way of life, people looking to change their worlds, the world. Clarion is my field site, my stage, my flawed foundation.

I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s early feminist Utopian story, Moving the Mountain, shortly after my first visit to the Clarion site. Gilman refers to her text as a “baby utopia, a little one that can grow.” She tells the story of a world not so different from our own, with a value placed on community, shared space, goodness. She got me asking, “How do I move mountains?”

Driving is a way to. Mountains shift place in my window frame as I pass. Get in the van. Go.

Photography is a way to. Double exposures. Copies. Multiples. Photography is a method for communing with the past. It is my way of building futures. The photograph is recorded time. It is moments of light made still. The photograph tells a story. The dark room, the sunlight, making records of time passing.

I process my film with a non-toxic developer made from coffee and vitamin C. Caffenol. This is a process rich with flaws. My film is streaked with stains. Scan it and the image is brightly colored, the scanner software strangely interpreting light as nearly neon, contemporary. Printing in the darkroom with caffenol as the developer, stains the paper coffee colored, dating it. I use cyanotypes to make prints with sunlight, time making marks upon chemistry as the sun shifts overhead.

Time collapses. Time is performed. Time moves mountains.

My artworks are a record of my research, they are methods for searching, they are the documents of my movements back to the land. They remind me of the value of the wild, of the soil, of the giant majestic mountains. They remind me to try to move mountains. They allow me to move mountains. An earnest, perhaps naive, attempt to make the world better.

Studio Visit

Q. Where is your ideal life?

A. In a simpler place.

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