Anna Stark

Artist Statement

I’ve been involved in art and creative expression for nearly fifteen years. I’ve been painting professionally for the past three. My goal has been to function as a kind of documentarian: I paint everyday objects, ranging from flowers to candy and soft drinks; from video game controllers to lunch boxes and pez dispensers. The idea is to communicate with the future, and describe what it was like to be alive at this point in history. 
 
I like to imagine that my art is documenting the artifacts of our culture, and I often daydream about our descendants pouring over these images and wondering what we were like. What we loved. What occupied our time and captured our imagination. What tapped into the nostalgic, playful nature of our collective personality, which has always tended to slip between the cracks of more forceful movers of history, such as politics, religion, the world economy and war. 

I want observers of my art to remember what it was like to have fun. I want the future observers of my art to know that it wasn’t all bad. I want them to know that our culture was packed to the brim with colorful adventure, decadent flavor and unabashed entertainment. I want to bottle up happiness itself and hurl it into the future, so they know that there were so many of us having a lot of fun during the very brief time we were here.