“VISIONARY DREAMS #2391–95”
Video installation / Cyber installation In the gallery halls
Anna Frants is a multimedia artist living in New York.
She was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 1989, she graduated from the Leningrad Higher School of Art and Industry named after V.I. Mukhina (now the St. Petersburg Academy of Design), receiving a classical education. Later, mastering new fields (computer graphics and animation), she expanded the scope of her creative interests.
Frants’ works have been recognized with awards from prestigious competitions. She received a prize for her 3D computer animation Angel at the Autodesk Planet Studio Award. Her short computer-animated film Angel was also part of the competition program of the SouthSide Film Festival (Pennsylvania, 2006) and the New York “Red Shift” Festival in 2004. Her works can be found in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kyoseinosato (Japan) and in private collections.
Anna Frants has participated in—and, in some cases, curated—numerous art exhibitions: the joint exhibition “Touch Me” (2003, Anna Akhmatova Museum, Saint Petersburg), which brought together American and St. Petersburg artists; the “Vivat, Saint Petersburg!” festival celebrating the city’s 300th anniversary (2003, Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, USA); the final exhibition of the international project “Ghanaian-Style Sarcophagus or The Funeral of a Dreamer” (2005, Berliner Kunstprojekt, Berlin); and the Chinese International Art Exhibition (2006, Beijing).
Solo exhibitions include:
“Sarcophagus Ghanaian-Style or The Funeral of a Dreamer” at the Kvadrat Gallery (2004, St. Petersburg);
“Window” (2005, Kyoseinosato, Japan).
For several years, she has taught media disciplines and animation. Anna Frants is a regular contributor to NY Arts Magazine, which focuses on issues in contemporary art.
“In her work, Anna Frants speaks in a cheerful, light tone about serious, profound matters, avoiding academic clichés and pretentious epithets. Using the principle of interactivity, she involves participants of all ages in her projects. /…/ The artist shows that new technologies are not just for entertainment, but are a powerful means of reflecting the human inner world — with all its complexity and nuance. In this way, computer art is close to traditional painting.”
— from an article by Olga Khoroshilova
At “Borey” Gallery, Anna Frants will present installations: Window, Made in Ancient Greece, as well as a series of works from the Static Video cycle and Video Graffiti.
A booklet is being prepared by the Borey Gallery for Anna Frants’ exhibition, featuring articles written by the artist on cyber and video art, published in NY Arts Magazine.
Olga Khoroshilova. “Anna Frants”
Picasso once said: “At the age of four I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child.”
This aphorism captures the essence of modern art — an art of revolutionaries, iconoclasts, and empirical researchers. Children are natural atheists, understanding the world purely through experience and rejecting established canons. Life is a blank slate, and every step promises discovery. This childlike attitude toward art was embodied by the early 20th-century avant-garde — Fauves, Cubists, Dadaists — and continued by contemporary media artists. Among them is Anna Frants, a digital artist and curator — a mature and accomplished individual, but in essence, a child.
Her creative journey follows the logic of Picasso’s statement. She really did “draw like an adult” for five years: from 1984 to 1989, she studied industrial design at the Mukhina School. She studied anatomy, produced academic studies, and mastered the fundamentals of design — acquiring traditional academic skills. After graduating and moving to the U.S., she realized industrial design was a meaningless pursuit and started anew, like a child, from a blank page. Not surprisingly, she chose computer animation as her new field and studied at Pratt Institute for two years. Then she immersed herself in contemporary art, integrating animation, video, and film, and continues “learning to draw like a child” — making discoveries, exploring unorthodox paths, and bringing fresh, nontrivial ideas to life.
In her work, Anna Frants speaks in a cheerful, light tone about serious, deep topics, avoiding academic formulas and lofty language. Using interactivity, she draws in people of all ages. One of her best-known projects is Touch Me (2002), a virtual studio for interactive collaboration between artists. Each participant modifies a base image using two main elements — video and sound — which are associated with certain colors. The result is a continuously transforming image with a musical background. Among the long-term project’s contributors are Alina Bliumis, Elena Gubanova, Asya Nemchenok, and Vladimir Gruzdev.
Sarcophagus, Ghanaian Style, or The Funeral of a Dreamer (2005) is another of Frants’ “childlike” projects. A white foam ball with fluttering wings hangs over lit candles. Video footage — scenes of life in a Ghanaian village, family film clips, and a spinning eye — is projected onto the ball. Frants wanted, “borrowing the idea from Ghanaian villagers,” to imagine her own funeral — joyfully and playfully. Other artists, including Andrei Bartenev, Maria Baturina, and Alexei Trubetskoy, followed with their own fantasy sarcophagus and funeral concepts.
Frants even avoids clichés in such a traditional genre as portraiture. In her latest project, Static Video (2006), she presented a series of electronic portraits — for example, of the well-known Leningrad nonconformist poet Konstantin Kuzminsky — “painted” using video, computer graphics, and animation. The artist demonstrates that new technologies are not just for entertainment, but are among the best tools for expressing the human inner world — in all its richness and nuance. In this, computer art is close to classical painting.
No matter how cutting-edge or revolutionary Anna Frants’ work may be, it remains deeply connected to the centuries-old heritage of the “three noble arts.” Media art is a bold and mischievous dreamer-child, perched on the shoulders of the academic giant.
Borey Art Centre December 19, 2006