My Own Private Arcadia features new paintings by Oakland-based artist Anna Valdez at OCHI Projects that move effortlessly in and around various genres of painting. Drawing upon the rich histories of landscape and still life—places and objects categorically separated yet fatefully intertwined with human presence—Valdez references, deconstructs, recreates, and celebrates painting. Valdez lovingly crafts saturated and dense scenes that appear to originate within the studio, becoming self-referential and boundless.
In Landscape Paintings (2021) a single desert landscape painting dominates the composition, its raw edge of canvas casting shade on a pink wall that displays more than a dozen small landscapes akin to marginalia in an illuminated manuscript. It is unclear whether these are postcards, sketches, photographs, magazine clippings, or small paintings, though the pile of artist monographs ostensibly full of even more unviewable landscapes perpetuates the tease. Since an image of a place is an object, Valdez’s still life of landscapes deftly navigates new terrain, anchored by her palette table tucked into the corner, overlapping the largest landscape like a cactus bloom.
A real or imagined place, rustic or idyllic in nature, an arcadia provides peaceful, simple pleasures. After Valdez assembles groupings of objects, plants, books, ephemera, and artworks in her studio, she cultivates digital drawings, ceramics, prints, sculptures, and many, many paintings from each set up. Though some objects are personally significant, nothing is sacred in depiction—Valdez “paints from life, but doesn’t adhere to it.” An ex-anthropologist and self-proclaimed unreliable narrator, Valdez creates multiple realities, perspectives, and portals. In Shell Study with Decorative Landscape (2021) a ceramic landscape of the sea sculpted by the artist hovers above a book about seashells, pinned open by a conch converted into a lamp, framed by potted plants and a bouquet of flora patterned fabrics. Valdez paints the pungent layers of reality with ease—an object, its representation, its abstraction, and its bibliography all peacefully coexisting. With even lighting and stiff drop shadows, Valdez eschews the passage of time and paints in a hyper vibrant spectrum of fuchsia, electric blue, tiger orange, violet, and hot pink—a reflection of the present, her presence, and her story told her way.
