An independent day school serving grades K-12 | St. Paul, MN

Anna Snider

Artist Statement

I started creating art as a desperate attempt to understand myself and the world around me. I fell in love with poetry because it gave me words to describe my experiences, unlike any other medium I have found. I love photography for the opposite reason: I do not have to use words to describe the way that I exist in the world -- I can capture it in a picture. My art is rooted in vulnerability as a framework for examining many complex issues such as mental health, chronic illness, and systems of power and oppression. In my most recent project, Inheritance, I combine photography and poetry. I deconstructed a poem that I had written and created photos that were in conversation with different sections of the poem. Then, I edited the text onto the images, creating a series of works that visually illustrated my poem. I make art about challenging topics; because of this, I search for ways to make my work more accessible to a larger audience. It is often daunting to sit down and read a whole poem -- especially when it is about mental illness and other messy topics -- but when the poem is broken into smaller pieces, and those pieces have a visual aspect to them, it often creates an entry point into the artwork. By establishing an entry point into my artwork, there becomes space to explore the subject matter which, ultimately, is the reason I create art. 
 

Inheritance 5/8, Anna Snider, Pigmented Ink Print, 2019

Inheritance 6/8, Anna Snider, Pigmented Ink Print, 2019

Inheritance 8/8, Anna Snider, Pigmented Ink Print, 2019

Inheritance 7/8, Anna Snider, Pigmented Ink Print, 2019

Untitled, Pigmented Ink Print, 2020