Today we’d like to introduce you to Ana Kamiar.
Ana, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I carry an overarching sentimentality within my psychology and so I carved this concept of preservation through image pretty early in my formative years. I got my first camera, a 110 kodak, point and shoot in middle school, at a coming of age summer camp. Previously, I wrote all that I wanted to remember in my journal, I wrote a lot and really fast. I remember it feeling like a chore because my hand would ache from tension but I had to get it all out on the page. When I was given my little 110, I wrote “I finally got a camera! I don’t have to write all this down anymore!”
My first film/darkroom class was in 10th grade. I have been thinking about photography in some way shape or form and using it ever since.
I think what drew me to the medium had to do with this idea of being able to touch something that no longer exists. As a young child, whenever I had the blessing to be home alone, my secret activity was to climb precarious furniture to get to the top shelf of my parents’ closet. Stored there, would be two leather briefcases. In them were all the negatives and photographs that never made it to the photo albums. These briefcases were magic, the end of the roll light leaks, the blown-out exposures, the half frames, the strange double exposures… all were a sparkle filled path to time travel.
I know that activity imbued the way I think about photography. For me, it is easy to fall completely, head over heels, into a photograph, and replay the reality I initially constructed. I designated photography to hold what I want to be a memory. And rarely do I remember anything that I have not photographed. For better or for worse, I have been very good at outsourcing my memory.
My art using photography has changed in a lot of ways and I am sure it will continue to do so. I have made projects that attempt to recreate the pictures not good enough to be in family albums, I have documented melancholic children at Disney World. A good portion of my past work was devoted to using my body as object in an attempt to figure out my own gaze relating to my body (kinda impossible to step outside of societal constructs but the attempt is worth the work). Currently, my work is about exploring time and space as a way to consider a balance beyond duality. For me, the works feel like confirmations, that beauty is a thing to behold, and I am grateful for it.
In every way, photography is always a document allowing light to write the frame I construct. And I always seem to use it to preserve the fleeting. But what is fleeting includes more than just physical experience, fleeting too, is inner experience. And inner experience for me is vital to document especially when I am learning something. The quest towards and/ or the many answers become my photographs. Those magical revelations that we have as people. I want to remember mine, so I photograph with them. In the end, I love to try and document the feeling I have towards something, not just a representation of a thing.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I question the value of contemporary art within society, as well as the linear context(s) chosen to include certain works as pivotal and others as not or “outsider”.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
My art process was created out of self-inquiry. I find it thrilling to learn this way. To extend a sort of quest to research and resolve, it helps keep my sense of purpose. The attempt at organizing all of what I am learning many times becomes a visual project.
Like many of us, I categorize everything through this giant perspective that all is connected energetically. I love to learn through, not just visual art, but through sound/music poetry and dance. I learn so much from all of them. I think because each form is an emphasis on a particular type of energy flow through the physical self. I love noticing efficiency in these movements.
Currently, the works I am sharing have been created with a sort of romance. A document of something I visually fell in love more and more as I made the composition. I think of my works as visual poetry. I hope the images I choose to share with others evoke a similar sense of poetry, that they may elevate the ordinary into the space of the surreal.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
My family and friends, all of whom support the idea of making. I am incredibly grateful that when I feel low with uncertainty, I have this foundation of love and support to confirm the authenticity in my visual voice which immediately lifts me back up.
Pricing:
- 260. 00 for limited edition 8×8 inch archival ink print on Hahnemühle cotton rag
- 290.00 for limited edition 13×13 inch archival ink print on Hahnemühle cotton rag
Contact Info:
- Website: www.anakamiar.com
- Phone: 3055025912
- Email: anakamiar@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anakamiar/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ana.kamiar
Image Credit:
Ana Kamiar
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