Annalise Neil lives and works in La Mesa, CA. She has a BFA in Printmaking from the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, with a minor in Art History (summa cum laude). She has completed residencies at Playa Summer Lake in Oregon, with Mira Schor through the New York City Crit Club, and an Artist Residency in Motherhood. Her work has been exhibited nationally at galleries and museums including Field Projects, NYC, The Irvine Fine Arts Center, and The Oceanside Museum of Art. Neil’s work has been featured in publications such as ArtMaze Mag, Colossal, The On Being Project, Emergence Magazine, All She Makes, Resurgence and Ecologist Magazine, and New Visionary Magazine. Her work resides in public and private collections across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
As my existence is that of a multitudinous being, my ideas are expressed using varied materials that each have unique visual and physical properties. Glass, paper, wood and stone with paint and photography form a coalition that I employ to fathom complexity. The actions that these mediums require have import: melting, rolling, pinching, sanding, polishing, walking across meadows, cheek on sun-warmed boulders. When fragility and flux is required, I have glass. Memory and time: cyanotype. Gravity: metal, dream: paint, energetic frequencies: stone. My earliest days and formative years were spent subsumed by matters of intense psychic and moral stress, which developed in me a sensitivity to the questions related to human motivation. Living as an itinerant for most of my life, I learned very young to notice and appreciate the different natural environments I landed in, discovering that wild places are where I find maximal awe and kinship. My visual art practice yolks the two themes of wilderness reverence and philosophical inquiry, and allows me to consider life in this labyrinthine and interconnected world. I endeavor to create work that will lead to contemplation and reflection, and that invites a thoughtful examination of our relationship to reality and our surroundings.