Anonda Bell

An installation view of "The Suburbs at 4 a.m.", recently on display at the Pascal Gallery, Ramapo College,

in Mahwah New Jersey.  Additional information can be found here

https://www.ramapo.edu/berriecenter/art-galleries/kresge-pascal/

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“In 1932 Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti create a work titled The Palace at 4.a.m.  This piece drew heavily on the artists personal experience (a brief, sex-laden encounter with a woman known only as Denise), and automatic art making techniques gleaned from association with the Surrealist movement. The work reads as a dream sequence – there is a stage like scene, with a suggestive narrative and clues indicating the presence of people of privilege engaging in the activities at a luxurious palace in the middle of the night. My work has been made in response, and it is not intended to be a linear, illustrated story. It is instead a deliberately ambiguous and rambling mess of complicated impressions that may come from the mind of a suburban insomniac at 4 a.m. The work references ideas about gender, labor, witchcraft, and the current climate in the United States (where women continue to be relegated to retrograde stereotypical roles, and at a time when women’s work outside the home is still only valued at 80% of their male counterparts). For the women depicted in these works there is a niggling sense of impending doom associated with the threat of diminished rights over their own bodies; the future is anything but bright and shiny.”