Henry Anker
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Things Like Wind Or Sneezes
Seven years ago, when I was living in LA, the Hammer Museum invited four Tibetan monks to make an impermanent mandala out of colored sand. The museum protected its collection from stray granules by hosting the ceremony in the lobby’s annex, separated by a large glass wall. The monks, I read, used an especially dense sand “to limit interference by things like wind or sneezes.”
I thought about the monks’ wind for the first time this summer, during Covid. It was awe-inspiring to see how easily my life and my friends’ lives could be disintegrated, how swiftly we were scattered across the country, as if by an angry tempest. Walter Benjamin writes, “a storm is blowing from Paradise ... with such violence.” And Pete Seeger sings:
It blow-ed away, it blow-ed away.
My Oklahoma home blow-ed away.
Oh it’s up there in the sky, in the dust cloud
rolling by, my Oklahoma home is blow-ed
away.
Things like wind or sneezes. I imagined the sand blowing off the monks’ mandala—a furious rainbow flurry! It would flow on an airborne current through the galleries and cover the Great Works in a veil of colored crystals. It would blow through Lenfest Center’s glass walls, walls designed to keep the world out. It would be The People’s Sand Storm: an immense psychedelic cloud gusting across the country, sweeping away Trump, Cuomo, Bezos, Becker, and all the other pro-liars who got richer while the rest of us paid.
This is what I thought about in “self- isolation.” Just before the lockdown, I managed to carry home three small paintings from the studio. I borrowed some of Lu’s colored sand—it was soft and cool—and scattered it over the three paintings. I think it’s a good start.
L to R: Portugese Man-O-War (60" x 48", Oil on cotton, 2020); Sleep (42" x 96", Oil on canvas, 2020); Baron In the Trees 1-4 (12" x 9", Oil, sand, and acrylic on panel, 2020); The Street (96" x 60", Oil on cotton, 2020)
