Anonda Bell

"4 a.m." is a work from the series "The Suburbs at 4 a.m." and it will be included in the upcoming exhibition "Spread Spectrum - A Modulation of Women Artists Speak", curated by Armisey Smith as part of the upcoming Newark Arts Festival, October 11-14, 2019.

Additional information can be found here: https://newarkarts.org/newarkartsfestival/

“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.”