Elevate: Anne Greenwood

Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the Northwest Arkansas community.

The program provides hotel guests and visitors with unique access to the work of notable regional artists, while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.

Bio: Anne Greenwood is an artist and educator living on the edge of a national park in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her inspiration comes from this type of blended landscape: the rough edges of a suburban yard, urban animals in human dominated spaces, or the borders of wild parkland. Passionate about the natural world, her work creates personal natural histories, playing with the conventions of natural history display and collection. She fuses painting, drawing, found objects, and sculpture: the works are likely to include carefully crafted drawings, feathers, insects, a gold jewelry box, or dried flowers. Familiar animals such as opossums or common bird species ground the works in urban wildlife. These are the works of someone who delights in a nature that is here, next door, and underfoot. 

Artist Statement: Like essayist Annie Dillard, I am “wandering awed on a splintered wreck” inside the natural world. In particular, I’m attracted to places where the wild breaks into the domesticated and becomes mingled, a phenomenon scientific communities refer to as the wildland-urban interface or otherwise known as urban wildlife. 

Within this space, I want to reveal a non-idyllic natural world: one that lives, dies, changes, thrives, adapts. I want to unpack the assumption that wildlife is somewhere else; wildlife, the wild, is with us and around us. 

I make works that could be called vignette-installations using found objects, drawings, paintings, fiber art, and sculptural elements. All the flotsam and jetsam of nature— a beetle carcass, dried plants, and animal bones— are brought together with these to create a personal natural history. Interwoven with this is my love of the closelooking inherent in detailed drawing and painting. This sustained looking is mated to a passion for the kind of collecting inherent in a children’s pocket of treasures: smooth rocks, feathers, a shiny button. There’s a wonder in that which I hope to never lose. 

My works also toy with the ways we try to preserve nature. Painted specimens are juxtaposed against preserved ones, asking for comparison, and works include dried specimens, resin or jarred specimens, and taxidermy. That dialogue with natural history’s habits of investigation and dissection are turned on myself and my relationship to art, on the human impulse towards preserving and the desire to know, and what it means to employ that towards the natural world. Often, specimens are laid out as if for inspection, but then distorted, excised, or hidden. In these, I want to bind together presence and absence, seeking to understand why we want to fix moments and experiences into the tangible. 

Like Emily Dickinson, I feel that “Nature is a Haunted House— but Art— a House that tries to be haunted.”