Shallows Unfolding with Anna Rotty
Shallows Unfolding with Anna Rotty
Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, November 12th, at 7 pm EST
Anna’s dynamic work investigates water, light, and infrastructure, informing her understanding of place. By constructing landscapes and making light a priority, she looks to highlight the intangible and emotional aspects of the world. Rotty will share recent work exploring the waters of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, where she examines the movement of water from place to place while ruminating on the ghosts of the river during droughts each summer. Her recent installation, Shallows Unfolding, synthesizes the act of the sun rising over the river and the process of UV wastewater treatment, representing flow, evaporation, condensation, and human intervention with large-scale photographic prints, collected materials from the dried riverbed, and river water amplified through light. Through layering time and creating sculptural bodies, she hopes her images serve as an active experience of landscape, rather than reiterating a passive gaze, as the medium of photography has historically so often portrayed the non-human ecologies of the American West.
Together, we will explore whether water can hold ghosts and memories, and what water can reveal about time and care.
Anna Rotty lives on Tiwa Pueblo land known as Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2024 she received her MFA in photography, and currently teaches at, the University of New Mexico. Rotty’s work has been published by Southwest Contemporary Magazine and Lenscratch, and she’s published two books with National Monument Press. Last year Rotty was a recipient of the Silver Eye Center for Photography Fellowship honorable mention. She has recently exhibited at Chung 24 Gallery in San Francisco, San Francisco Camerawork as part of FORECAST, Princeton University, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and Texas Tech University. She was a 2024 fellow resident at MASS MoCA and is currently exhibiting at the Vladem Contemporary New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.
Instagram: @annarotty
Website: www.annarotty.com
