December 19 – 30, 2006
video installation/cyber installation
Anna Frants, a multimedia artist based in New York, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1989, she graduated from the Leningrad Higher School of Industrial Art named after V.I. Mukhina (now the St. Petersburg Academy of Design), where she received a classical education. Later, by mastering new fields (computer graphics and animation), she expanded her creative horizons. Anna’s works have been recognized with awards at prestigious competitions, including a prize for her three-dimensional computer animation “Angel” at the Autodesk Planet Studio Award. Her short computer-animated film “Angel” also participated in the competitive program of the SouthSide Film Festival (Pennsylvania, 2006) and the New York festival “Red Shift” in 2004. Her works can be found in the Museum of Modern Art KyoseinoSato (Japan) and in private collections.
Anna Frants has been a participant and, in some cases, curator of numerous art exhibitions: the joint exhibition uniting American and St. Petersburg artists, “Touch me” (2003, St. Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House), the festival “Vivat, St. Petersburg!”, dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the city (2003, Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, USA), the final exhibition of the international project “Sarcophagus Pagan Style or the Funeral of a Dreamer” (2005 Berliner Kunstprojekt, Berlin), the Chinese International Art Exhibition (2006, Beijing). Personal exhibitions include: “Sarcophagus Pagan Style or the Funeral of a Dreamer” at the “Quadrat” gallery (2004, St. Petersburg), the “Window” exhibition (2005 KyoseinoSato, Japan.) For several years, she has taught media disciplines and animation. Anna Frants is a regular contributor to NY Arts Magazine, dedicated to contemporary art issues.
“In her works, Anna Frants speaks a cheerful, light language about serious, profound things, avoiding academic cliches and high-flown epithets. Using the principle of interactivity, she involves a large number of participants of different ages in her projects. /…/ The artist shows that new technologies are not only ‘entertainment’ but also the best means of reflecting the inner world of a person – with all its complexities and nuances. And in this, computer art is close to traditional painting” (from an article by Olga Khoroshilova).
At “Borey,” Anna Frants will show installations: “Window,” “Made in Ancient Greece,” a series of works from the “Static Video” cycle, and “Video Graffiti.” The gallery is preparing a booklet for Anna Frants’s exhibition, featuring articles written by Anna Frants on cyber- and video art published in NY Arts Magazine.
Olga Khoroshilova: “Anna Frants”
Picasso once said, “I painted like an adult for four years, but spent the rest of my life learning to paint like a child.” This aphorism is the story of modern art – the art of revolutionaries, subversives, empirical researchers. Children are atheists, understanding the surrounding world exclusively through experience and not believing in canons. Life is a blank slate, and every step promises discovery. This childlike approach is precisely how the avant-garde artists of the early 20th century, including Fauvists, Cubists, Dadaists, and modern media artists, approached art. Among them is Anna Frants, a computer artist and curator, a serious, established person, but essentially – a child.
Her creativity develops according to Picasso’s aforementioned aphorism. For five years, she indeed “painted like an adult.” From 1984 to 1989, she studied at the Mukhina School in the industrial design faculty, learning anatomy, creating studies, and mastering the basics of design, in short, mastering the stiff academic canons. After graduating and moving to the United States, she realized that industrial design was utterly meaningless. She started from scratch, like a child – with a blank slate. It’s no coincidence that her new occupation was computer animation, and she spent two years learning at the Pratt Institute. Then she turned to contemporary art, including animation, video, and cinema, and has been “learning to paint like a child” ever since – that is, making discoveries, taking unconventional paths, and embodying fresh, non-trivial ideas in her work.
In her works, Anna Frants speaks in a cheerful, light language about serious, profound things, avoiding academic cliches and high-flown epithets. Using the principle of interactivity, she involves a large number of participants of different ages in her projects. One of Anna Frants’s most famous projects is “Touch Me” (2002), a virtual studio where artists interactively modify a provided image, manipulating two main elements – video and a sound background associated with specific colors for each participant. The result is a constantly changing picture with musical accompaniment. Participants in this long-running project include Alina Blumis, Elena Gubanova, Asya Nemchenok, and Vladimir Gruzdev.
“Sarcophagus, Ghanaian Style, or The Funeral of a Dreamer” (2005) is another ‘childish’ project by Frants. A white foam sphere with fluttering wings hangs over lit candles. The video sequence projected onto the sphere includes life in a Ghanaian tribe intercut with family chronicle footage and a spinning eye. Thus, Anna Frants whimsically fantasized about her own funeral, “borrowing the idea from Ghanaian peasants” – cheerfully and with childlike enthusiasm. Following Anna Frants’s lead, other artists such as Andrey Bartenyev, Maria Baturina, and Alexey Trubetskoy offered their versions of their own sarcophagi and funerals.
Anna Frants manages to avoid truisms even in such an academic genre as portraiture. In her most recent project, “Static Video” (2006), she presented a series of electronic portraits (including the well-known Leningrad nonconformist poet Konstantin Kuzminsky), ‘painted’ using video, computer graphics, and animation. The artist shows that new technologies are not just ‘entertainment’ but also the best means of reflecting the inner world of a person – with all its complexities and nuances. And in this, computer art is close to traditional painting.
Anna Frants’s work, however revolutionary and cutting-edge it may be, is nonetheless connected to the centuries-old experience of ‘the three noblest arts.’ Media art is a bold and mischievous child, but it sits on the shoulders of an academic giant.”