Janna Avner
Avner's paintings, sculptures, and videos emphasize cognition and perception by generating physical and digital experiences. When viewed from oblique angles, her work reveals the interactions of projected light filtered through optical effects resulting in a recreation of the Aurora Borealis. Avner produces phygital works where liminality, in-between spaces, and experiences outside a colonized world offer new possibilities.
As a multi-heritage Alaska Native (Koyukon Athabaskan), she documents natural light in the Alaskan and Californian terrain to reimagine perception as indigenous, subliminal, and theoretical. The work insists that perception is as much a simple act as it is a subjective creation. “False light” permeates her pieces and may appear artificial and, at other times, genuine. Light is not objective; it bends and twists, invoking the unsolvable particle-wave paradox in quantum mechanics. This shifting and unresolved framework guides my physical and experiential image-making.
Using light as a material, Avner reclaims the romanticization of landscape imagery, otherwise intended for policies of manifest destiny that drive tourism, commerce, and profit, by providing expansive interpretations of indigeneity, perception, and the environment. As a visual metaphor, projections of beadwork and indigenous imagery become the light that moves through everything, embodying continuity in relation to past and present technologies. Digital, traditional, and upcycled materials form hybrid objects representing an imagined and ancestral imaginary. If humans perceive and actively participate in the optical viewing of phenomena, Avner's work speculatively asks, ‘What is seen when imagining the future?’