Ann Wachter Poetics

Get your daily dose!

Artist Statement

Writing is my primary art but I’ve recently discovered that ephemeral objects like paper and cardboard or family photos, in combination with my writing, allow me to expand my text visually. So I’m using this technique to capture and create histories as visual formats while honoring my primary art mediums in prose and poetry.

In studio, my art shifts and tugs, demanding me to make its purpose visible to others. I identify what propels me to write — topics which inhabit a lifelong undertow submerging my feminist ideals about family and society challenging me to prevent their erasure. Poems about the downtrodden work in collage — snippets of relevant news articles, morphed silhouettes cast against them and poetic narratives in a way which invites the viewer to see history through another lens, one dedicated to magnifying the subjugation and objectification of others. I consider the circumstances which allow me to dismiss my behaviors and attitudes; explore how this operates in the face of fears and anxieties, as well other adversities which impact others. I siphon these realities in order to reveal how human behaviors operate politically and socially.

I study how human behavior shapes social networks which in turn shape systems  — political, capitalistic, educational, health and welfare — in order to access whether and/or to what extent governmental sovereignties are evolving and changing in our times but perhaps more importantly, what this means to each of us individually and to society.

Other important projects for me are:

(i) family as a stronghold for values and legacy through narrative and poetics;

(ii) individual expression as art through the lens of the ekphrastic form.

Each day tugs me in new directions while family and home management pull me away. This push-pull reminds me of Dr. Doolittle’s llama, a metaphor whose nuances penetrate my extrapolations and daily rituals; a common catalyst, an overarching schematic of life in our times, and hopefully a mechanism which allows my audience to identify with my feminist challenges, my vulnerabilities, my humanity.

This is my art.