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PROJECT
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BIO
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During her residency, Amber Eve Anderson expects to return to the fundamentals of her process: navigating a new place through the use of digital platforms (publicly uploading photographs and virtual reality images to Google maps) and orienting herself in a new place based on the natural aspects of her surroundings and found objects. She hopes to find commonalities between Baltimore and Montreal. Geographically speaking, they are both situated near bodies of water. A simple Google search reveals that the second autofill result is “safe” after typing “is Baltimore” and “is Montreal,” even though she was searching for “island.” This says more about those Googling than it does about either place – especially since the results are wildly different, Montreal being “very safe,” while “Baltimore’s crime rate is significantly higher than the national rate.” As an outside in either place, though, Google is a starting point, and the autofill results make a point. The results frame the outsider’s view. During the exchange in Montreal, she wants to consider the tools at an outsider’s disposal. Google and its various navigational platforms (Maps, Streetview, etc.) are an important site of investigation. Maps are made for outsiders (insiders already know how to get around). What does this reveal about ourselves?
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Amber Eve Anderson (b. 1982, Omaha, NE) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work is rooted in ideas of home and displacement, often combining aspects of the digital and the real. She received her MFA in 2016 from the Mount Royal School of Art multidisciplinary program at MICA. Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Finland, Morocco, and Peru. She has been awarded residencies at Wagon Station Encampment in Joshua Tree, CA and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. Her self-published book, Free to a Good Home, was purchased by the New York Public Library and is sold at Printed Matter. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Baltimore and is a regularly contributing writer at BmoreArt.
PRACTICE
Rooted in the poetics of the everyday, Anderson's work captures the sense of loneliness intrinsic to the vast expanses of the prairie and the experience of leaving home. As she moved around the world, she saw that same distance repeated in the deserts and coastlines of Peru, Syria, and Morocco. She uses the familiar, uninterrupted horizon separating earth and sky to orient myself in the world. She makes lists and maps and timelines. She documents absences. She traverses digital landscapes. She constructs lyrical narratives based on personal experiences and imagined histories. Deliberate and intuitive, She build archives of images, objects, and text.
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