Pure artist - Anna Bush Crews

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Anna Bush Crews

Anna Bush Crews is currently course leader of Photographic Art at the University of Wales College, Newport. She was born and grew up in Taos, New Mexico, has lived in Ecuador, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi, Qatar, and now lives in Bath, England. Her most recent solo exhibition, Saturation, was exhibited at the hotbath Gallery in Bath, England in 1997. date with time was at the Watershed in 1996, and the show was toured by watershed for two years. Anna Bush has also exhibited in numerous group shows. A video installation, Reflections on what makes a wave move, was part of Swinging the Lead, shown at the Leadworks during Bristol's Festival of the Sea in 1996, a well received exhibition including work by Richard Long and Helen Chadwick. She is a member of the artist group, KONICUS. Current work is with video, coloured photograms, and alternative processes.

Artist's Statement - date with time

The photographic image freezes a moment for all time, and helps preserve that moment, but time keeps moving on and every moment that passes creates a greater distance from that photographic fraction. The photograph can come to replace that time--it forms our memory. Associations are made with the image even if we do not know the moment or situation or time that keeps its distance.

With the moment gone there is the expectation that the photograph continues, or at least the negative, with its seemingly endless capacity for reproducing what is caught in its ultrathin surface. Immaterial from whatever our associations might be with that captured lost moment, it is the materiality of the photographic emulsion caught in time’s grip that is imperilled.

date with time investigates what it is that makes the mark and points to the negative as the paradigm of the photographic. The representational ends which dominate perception of the image are impinged upon by the deterioration of the negative and the subject becomes dissociated from what constitutes its being.

Late 19th and early 20th century glass plates that exist as anonymous artifacts, having in common their active deterioration and the fact of their preservation, form the basis of date with time. Seductive color, a function of the eroding marks of time and materiality transferred from the unpredictable chemical surface of the negative in collaboration with state of the art color printing technology, situates these photographs in the late 20th/early 21st century.

Intentions of the photographer and of the sitter when they made their portrait pact are not a consideration--the full plate is reproduced. Marks of time have taken over any gesture of flattery and the pose assumes no more importance than the juncture between backdrop and studio prop. The actuality of the plates now transferred from the still mutating surface modified by time is met by our way of looking, informed as we are now by a century of abstraction, to help us ponder what’s revealed beneath the shallow surface of deterioration.

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