MTC ART GALLERY

The MTC community art program presents:

MOTION

Photographs by
Anne Terpstra

Anne Terpstra is a San Francisco-based printmaker and photographer. A native of the city, she lives and works in the artistically vibrant Mission district. Anne has studied Fine Art at San Francisco State University for the past five years and was gallery manager of the Martin Wong Gallery, a student gallery within the Fine Arts department at San Francisco State University, in 2007 and 2008. Anne has experience in exhibition design management, curating, installing and documenting shows. She currently provides assistance in the installation and documentation of art shows at a new gallery in San Francisco, Gallery 60SIX.

Anne has worked with other artists as a master printer, printing several editions of a series of etchings by Tadayoshi Nakabayashi, master Japanese printmaker and living treasure of Japan (edition entitled Nothing Can Escape Decomposition). Anne has created multiple series of prints at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. She currently exhibits her work in San Francisco galleries and has won awards in printmaking, including the Silvia Walters printmaking prize at the 17th and 18th Annual Stillwell Shows, A Juried Graduate and Undergraduate Exhibition at San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery. Anne has published monotypes as cover art for CD packages by Adventure Music, New York, NY, and is available for commission.

Artist's Statement

These photographs seek to establish new spatial and optical relationships and explore the idea of proprioception, which has to do with one’s unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself. I am interested in how fast we traverse time and space through current modes of transportation and what control this offers us, but also what control it takes away from one’s ability to interpret surrounding environments. At the rate we are moving, we now have less control and cannot perceive internally how fast we are moving. In a sense we have lost a major mode of perception when traveling. We don’t always take the time to think about the pace at which we are moving and how this changes not only our perception of what we see through our window, but also how this changes one’s perception of the self. By taking pictures in motion, and freezing them into still images, I illustrate a loss of control in the physical realm that draws one’s attention into an inner reality.

The images in “Motion” are all digital color inkjet prints. The works presented were taken in major cities around the world, including, but not limited to, San Francisco, New York City, Paris, Dresden and Shanghai. In Shanghai, in the spring of 2009, I began to use digital photography to capture my subjects in motion by way of shooting from moving cars or by shooting moving objects themselves while keeping the camera still. I found this process of creating images extremely liberating in its taking on a quality of indirectness. At the speed some of the images are taken it goes without saying that I do not know exactly how a print will come out. This artistic distance mirrors both the mode and subject of the images created.

Capturing cities in motion indirectly illustrates progress, currently a big issue in Shanghai, as traditional ways of living and “old towns” in Shanghai are rapidly being demolished and new skyscrapers erected in their place. The shots capture an abstract spontaneity in their use of color and the blurred effects of a moving camera. Exposing modern life in a state of flux, the images reveal a passage of time and distance traversed, allowing one to enter into a state where space and light bend, opening doors to the unconscious.
—Anne Terpstra