Later this spring, she’ll install looping GIFs in Portland, Oregon’s Soft
Space gallery. When Cruz was invited to produce the animations sev-
eral months ago she said, “I didn’t want to tell them I didn’t know
how to do it, so I learned.” Thusly building her lexicon.
“It’s making me expand on a narrative,” she explained. “I have to
visualize what’s happening between the pictures. Taking one picture
and putting it under a microscope slows my thinking down, so I really
have take my time…I like to use very mundane actions that require a
lot of observing, so it becomes a meditation around very simple acts.”
“So much in my vocabulary sped up when I made [my drawings]
move…my drawings in the zines were storyboarding to get the idea,
but they were still separate images,” said Cruz about the spaces she’s
begun creating through this expanding, communicative topography.
Using vellum because it is thicker and sturdier than tracing paper, she
layers one drawing atop the next and is invigorated by the challenges
of these sequential images. “I don’t want to use programs [to draw for
me]. I’m a basic draftsman and that’s what I enjoy most, fi guring out
how I want it to move. Then it becomes three-dimensional: not just
left and right, but toward the viewers.”
Recently, Cruz and her partner, Adam Lavigne, started their Lemon
Press to publish zines. At heart, she’s turned on by the proletarian
nature of cheap art, calling the process “democratic.” She’s enamored
by how they can be run and rerun to fuel demand, and be utilized as
a vehicle to express a personal mythology.
You can see more at:
AnnaCruz.tumblr.com
Still Life, frame capture from GIF image
Orlando Arts & Culture, v. 2.4
Liminal Spaces, acrylic on canvas
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