Anna Coghlan

I was born in Manchester, England, in 1948 and have a background in medical administration.
I spent my twenties living in the Middle East and working for aid programmes in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
These experiences have shaped my interest in geographical and cultural dislocations. I repeatedly return
to the marked body and the physical effects on the human figure of its environment and circumstances.
I moved to Canada in 1976 and since graduating from the BFA programme at OUC have regularly exhibited
work in public and alternative galleries across Canada.

Anna Coghlan and Michael Hermesh "omens and icons"
October 9th to October 23rd

White Dress III Mixed Media on Canvas 48 x 24 inches	Black Stockings Mixed Media on Canvas 40 x 30 inches

White Stockings Mixed Media on Canvas 48 x 36 inches	White Stockings - detail Mixed Media on Canvas

White Stockings II Mixed Media on Canvas 48 x 36 inches	White Stockings II - detail Mixed Media on Canvas

Short White Dress Mixed Media on Canvas 40 x 30 inches	Short White Dress - detail Mixed Media on Canvas

Short White Dress II Mixed Media on Canvas 40 x 30 inches

Poupee IV Mixed Media on Canvas 87 x 54 inches

Black Coat Mixed Media on Canvas 20 x 16 inches

"omens and icons" Mixed Media on Panel 24 x 20 inches

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Swimmer Mixed Media on Panel 48 X 48 inches

Les filles attendant I Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 24 inches	Les filles attendant II Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 24 inches

Day Before Yesterday I Mixed Media on Canvas 30 X 40 inches

White Dress V Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 36 inches

Eve Mixed Media on Canvas 38 X 27 inches	Genesis Mixed Media on Canvas 50 X 26 inches

Silence I Mixed Media on Canvas 36 X 24 inches	Silence II Mixed Media on Canvas 36 X 24 inches

Totem Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 36 inches	Absolute Truth VI Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 36 inches

Absolute Truth V Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 24 inches	Absolute Truth XI Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 24 inches

Absolute Truth XXIX Mixed Media on Panel 24 X 20 inches	Absolute Truth XXX Mixed Media on Panel 24 X 20 inches

Night Train Mixed Media on Canvas 24 X 48 inches

Absolute Truth I Mixed Media on Canvas 47 X 36 inches	Absolute Truth III Mixed Media on Canvas 47 X 36 inches

Trapeze II Mixed Media on Canvas 72 X 48 inches

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

My work is usually figurative but the surface of each painting or drawing is as important to me as the image
that comes out of it. I use layers, graffiti, grooves and erasures to suggest the passing of time and the marks of experience (both physical and psychological) on the human body. I have always been interested in the function of the portrait and the emotional and cultural associations of different poses and my drawings have been influenced by figures in early black and white photographs with their stern demeanors, fading surfaces and their suggestion of moral weight.
In my work I re-interpret some of my own memories and experiences using these devices.

Bather Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 48 inches	Forged Identities IV Mixed Media on Canvas 48 X 48 inches

Les Enfants des Eglises II Mixed Media on Paper 12 X 5 inches	Innocence and Beyond 1 Mixed Media on Paper 10 X 7 inches	Les Enfants des Eglises III Mixed Media on Paper 12 X 5 inches

Les Enfants des Eglises IV Mixed Media on Paper 12 X 5 inches	Les Enfants des Eglises Va Mixed Media on Paper 12 X 5 inches	Les Enfants des Eglises Vb Mixed Media on Paper 12 X 5 inches

Letters From Home #1 Mixed Media on Paper 8 X 10 inches	Letters From Home #2 Mixed Media on Paper 8 X 10 inches

Letters From Home #3 Mixed Media on Paper 8 X 10 inches	Letters From Home #4 Mixed Media on Paper 12 X 6 inches	Letters From Home #5 Mixed Media on Paper 12 X 6 inches

Innocence and Beyond 5 Mixed Media on Paper 10 X 7 inches	Innocence and Beyond 6 Mixed Media on Paper 10 X 7 inches	Innocence and Beyond 10 Mixed Media on Paper 10 X 7 inches

"Dancer in Red II" Mixed Media on Paper 14 X 11 inches	"Figure 1" Mixed Media on Paper 10 X 8 inches	"Figure 2 " Mixed Media on Paper 10 X 8 inches

"Calistoga" Mixed Media on Paper 15 X 10 inches	Plainsong Mixed Media on Paper 26 X 15 inches

Selected exhibitions
2006
"Absolute Truth" Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna Oct 28-Nov 10
"Where Do You Stand?" Rotary Centre for the Arts, Kelowna, BC May 2006
2005
"Forged Identities" Art Ark Gallery Kelowna October-November 2005
2004
"Recent Acquisitions", Kelowna Art Gallery, Dec. 4th, 2004 to Feb. 5th, 2005
"Drawings" , Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna, BC, Oct. 4th to Nov. 28th 2004
"From the Interior: Landscapes and Memories" (new works) Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, Pentiction, BC
2003
"Landscape and Memory", Triangle Gallery, Calgary, Alberta
"Landscape and Memory", Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna, BC
"Black, White and Colour", Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna, BC.
2002
"Anna Coghlan: Brave & Private Worlds" Okanagan University College Fine Arts Gallery, Kelowna BC.
'Anna Coghlan: Recent Works" 8 Sisters Gallery Penticton
"Diva Collective" and "Heat" Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna BC
2001
"The Creative Voice" Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, Penticton BC
"The Body" and "Narrative" Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna BC
"ARTROPOLIS" (Curated Section) Vancouver BC
2000
Mouvement Instabile/Unstable Motion" Galerie Verticale, Laval, Que.
"A Place to Stay Forever" Art Gallery of the S Okanagan, Penticton, BC
"Shared Premises" Armstrong Spallumcheen Art Gallery, Armstrong
"Figure & Ground" Bowen Island Gallery, Bowen Island, BC
1999
"Cultural Imprints" Campbell River Art Gallery, Campbell River, BC
"Anna Coghlan: Reconstructions" Alternator Gallery, Kelowna BC
"Traces & Imprints" Comox Valley Art Gallery, Courtenay BC
"Print Invitational - Exhibition of Boxed Prints" Kelowna Art Gallery
1998
"Imprints" Prince George Art Gallery, Prince George BC
". . . with an accent" Art Gallery of the S. Okanagan, Penticton BC
"Cultural Imprints" Grand Forks Art Gallery, Grand Forks BC.
"From the Gallery's Permanent Collection" Kelowna Art Gallery
"Anna Coghlan: DRAWINGS" Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna BC.

Artwork in Permanent Collections
Kelowna Art Gallery ( 5 mixed media works)
Kelowna Art Gallery (drawing)
Kelowna Art Gallery (drypoint/etching)
Okanagan University College (prints and paintings).
University of Calgary (print)
Glenbow Museum, Calgary (print).

Excerpt from exhibition catalogue "Unstable Motion", August 2 to September 10, 2000.
Written by Marcel Saint-Pierre, Curator

Waiting as Movement Anna Coghlan's drawings are body studies, superimposed sketches and accumulated
poses linked in a way that gives these figures or beings both spatial orientation and moral weight. Though
it is impossible to say whether the subjects are men or women, all these portraits manifest a clinical interest
in deformed or wasted bodies and in the marks of their progress, often unfinished, which correspond to the
deliberate vagueness of their limbs and faces. Mostly seated, in poses that clearly suggest waiting, these
bodies are marked as much by physical as by mental suffering: these seem to be moral portraits rather than
faithful depictions of external objects. In their innumerable tracks, which like the lines on a hand, indicate
the fate of this heavy flesh, we are tempted to see the condensed expression of a lifetime's experience.
Implying the weight of existence and time, these drawings lend themselves to such an interpretation,
through bodies that are mere suggestions of human anatomy; instead of finished shapes and the meanings
culturally associated with the poses, the artist prefers to operate within the texture of the image, within its
web of memory. This incarnation is made up of tracks that have never been made, of course, but are
nonetheless visible. It enables us to construct or even reconstitute the passing of time, not through a
sequential scenario or through linked images as in a film but through a compacting of time as a whole
inside the fixed image. The subject that emerges under the onlooker's eye as a time-image rather than a
movement-image is thereby transformed, redrawn. Coghlan's indecisive figures, set in vague landscapes,
are in the image of the settings, as captive as their depictions are evanescent. They are prisoners of their
own passivity; everything seems to happen slowly or rather to fuse together in a sort of graphic restoration
or plotting, a condensation of images of waiting. Looking at these many graphic approximations, these
frequent adjustments of pose, we find ourselves as gripped by the surface textures as by the unfinished
portraits. All these visual indicators are in a sense virtual, all these half obliterated tracks, these vectors of
waiting that trace the unstable condition of the figures, give them a certain quality of flux. To speak here of
the shift between the body represented and the body of the image, between figuration and defacement or
immobility and movement is a way of saying that Coghlan's work encloses within this gap the virtuality that
informs these images, which are called fixed as opposed to those which are in movement. Despite their
motionless poses, their expectant state, their wait-and-see aura evokes a desire to leave, to take sides in
the waiting, to commit to action. As Coghlan would say, "Creating adventure at home! " Here is imaginary
nomadism, reminding us that there is no waiting without hope nor action without desire, and that
representational space is also a place for self-projection. If these portraits draw attention to suspended
time rather than to the depiction of identities, it is because they embody this tension as a transforming value.
With their uncertain balance between figuration and defacement, between recognition and misreading,
between evocations of immobility and of movement properly speaking, these memory-images evoke the
existentialist predicament of forms depicting the invisible internal pain, as much part of civilization as is art
itself. The virtuality of these images formed by where we have been rather than by where we are going
makes us look and look again. Here is a reciprocity that makes the image not one of resemblance or of an
analogy to the real, but one of thought, of states of mind and their extent. In this exercise, in the to-and-fro
created by these works, in the gap between thought and its movement as in the gap between the fixed
images and the movement they imply, we should perhaps ask ourselves what kind of subject emerges.
After all, our sense of wholeness is itself always in flux, always changing. It is not innate, but constructed
and contingent, not natural, not a given. Is this the reason why these portraits so often bear titles such as
Nameless or Untitled Figure? Others, like those in the series of drawings inspired by the motivations that
drove Rimbaud into exile, are characteristic of the attention Coghlan pays to the hidden part of human
beings, of individualities. What do we know about the materiality or immateriality of the bodies depicted?
How do these images (internal and external) of the body speak to the basic question" who am I and
where am I going?

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