Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Anna Fidler

Posted by petra.sairanen

The Pointing Path

• Dates: January 6 – February 27, 2025
• Artist talk and gallery reception: January 30, 11am – noon
• Gallery hours:
  • Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
  • Saturdays by appointment

The Helzer Gallery is pleased to announce The Pointing Path, a new exhibition of paintings by Anna Fidler. Fidler’s artwork explores and manifests the ways the artist visualizes spiritual realities. In The Pointing Path, Fidler shares with us three colossal colorful gouache and Flashe works on paper, along with four smaller dimensional paintings made of meticulously cut out and stacked pieces of paper.

Two of the large works have symmetrical compositions and emit a sense of balance and order. 7 Spirit Houses depicts tall stacked architectural forms, each with distinct geometric shapes and color palettes, while Exhalation Sanctuary reads like a portal to a landscape flanked by the sun and moon. As the title suggests, the artist describes this work as “the place where spirits go to relax.” Ceremony of Sharpening is an asymmetrical composition depicting three disjointed landscapes interrupted by large red forms. In Fidler’s words, this painting is about the ways in which the spirit world comes in and out of focus for those who are tuned into it.

The four cut-out paintings are no less impressive for their comparative size. These “Figurative Energy Portraits” depict well known historical figures such as Anthony and Cleopatra, or friends of the artist, as in “The Séance”. Each figure is constructed of paper silhouettes, cut out and stacked. These layers become more diminutive as they rise revealing slivers of color along the edges. In “The Séance” each figure is connected to another through chains of tiny dots which weave through the air above like interconnected thoughts or feelings. Like the large paintings, the backgrounds of these glow with flat deep color that has a sense of both absorbing and emitting energy and light.

Fidler describes herself an intuitive artist.  To the non-artist, it is important to distinguish between instinct and intuition. All beings come into the world with instinct, which mainly serves to keep them alive. An artist is not born with intuition, rather it is something developed through years of education and practice in a medium. Because of this, an artist like Anna Fidler has an ingrained understanding of her paints, color theory, composition, shape, and scale. She knows her medium so well that the creative act has become intuitive. Sometimes intuition guides the artist one step at a time. Sometimes works manifest as completed visions which only need to be made real. In pursuing spiritual ideas in her work, Fidler can rely on her intuition to guide her visual choices.

Art has long been used to manifest the spiritual. Some have argued that cave paintings were made by shamans to bring fortune in hunts and speak to the spirits of the past. From stained glass windows to murals and illuminated manuscripts, evidence of the spiritual in art also exists in ancient churches and temples around the world. In Modernism, artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and Mark Rothko held abstraction as the purest form of connection to the spiritual realm. In 2018 the world was introduced to the art of Hilma af Klint, whose large-scale paintings were made at the turn of the 19^th century. She worked in response to spirits she communed with who ordered her to make work for a future temple.

Like those who came before her, Anna Fidler’s practiced creative intuition allows entrance to avenues to expressing the unseen: the felt, the known and the connections between. By trusting her intuition Fidler gives form to things we may understand without knowing why.

About the artist

Anna Fidler (b. 1973, Traverse City, Michigan) lives in Corvallis, Oregon where she teaches studio art at Oregon State University. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in 1995 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in studio art from Portland State University in 2005. Fidler has had solo exhibitions at The Boise Art Museum, APEX at The Portland Art Museum, Johansson Projects in Oakland, Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Oregon, Disjecta, Portland, Oregon, and has been widely exhibited at such venues as The Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science, and Art, The University of Southern California, The Tacoma Art Museum and The Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Washington Post, The Oregonian and The San Francisco Chronicle. Grants and awards include an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, a Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant, and residencies at Painting’s Edge in Idyllwild, California and The Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Her work is held in the collections of The Portland Art Museum, The Boise Art Museum, Portland Portable Works Collection and Seattle Portable Works Collection. Fidler is represented by Johansson Projects in Oakland, California.