Ana Jotta: Never the Less
Opening reception: September 7, 2023, 6-8pm
Over the course of the past five decades, the Portuguese artist Ana Jotta has developed a deeply personal artistic vocabulary that rejects and even antagonizes all forms of classification and identification. Instead of any recognizable style, she argues in favor of inconsistency and irreverence. She takes from, subverts, and trespasses across all aesthetic categories, making a world that exists only on her own terms. Drawn to collecting the most unclassifiable images, objects, phrases, or even marks on a wall, her acts of gathering are fully enmeshed within her acts of making, and as she extracts from what she experiences in the world, she puts the pieces back together in an order that is entirely her own.
Instead of attempting to encompass Jotta’s entire practice, this exhibition narrows its focus around a specific aspect of her work and uses it as a lens to reflect on her approach more broadly: the expanded sense she brings to the act of drawing—drawing on, drawing out, drawing in, drawing from.