ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Ann Burke Daly is an Interdisciplinary Artist, whose time-based installation artwork has appeared in Artforum, Artpress International, The Los Angeles Times, Cabinet Magazine, PAJ/Performing Arts Journal, and El Pais. Ann earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art, Painting Program, and is an alum of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, in Studio Art. She has exhibited internationally including The Alternative Museum, Lombard-Freid Gallery, White Columns, Exit Art, The Drawing Center, Linda Kirkland Gallery, Trial Balloon (NY); LAMAG (CA); LaCentrale Galerie Powerhouse (Montreal); Uppsala KonstMuseum (Sweden); Centre Pompidou (Paris); Akademie der Kunste (Berlin); Museum fur Neue Kunst-ZKM (Karlsrühe).
For 2024, Ann has received a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Award in Interdisciplinary Arts. The supported project is "Mapping Vapours, Sonic Fields." In 2022–2023 Ann received a Millay Arts Core Residency Award in Visual Art for Mapping Vapours; a NYSCA/NYFA Artists with Disabilities Pandemic Grant; a Porter Fund Prize from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation also for Mapping Vapours; and a Puffin Foundation Visual Art Grant for Restless Language, Restlessly Yours. In 2021 Ann was the Artist-in-Residence at VCFA in the Visual Arts MFA Program, and in 2018, was awarded a Yaddo Visual Artist Residency. In 2019 her work was the focus of a conference and screening at Universidad De Castilla–LaMancha, Spain, Half-Life: Recent Multidisciplinary Works by Ann Burke Daly. The project Half-Life: a Forensics of Plain Sight, was a culture feature in El Pais,"Inch by Inch Against Oblivion...," also in 2019. Ann was awarded a 2016 Artist Residency at MASS MoCA Studios, returning in 2017, and was a Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome in 2015.
Daly's awards include an Art Matters Foundation Fellowship, funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (CAAD, cross disciplinary, collab project), John Anson Kittredge grant (Harvard University), and she was selected for a John Michael Kohler Center Arts/Industry Program Award. She was a finalist in 2019 for the Virginia Humanities Fellowship for Restless Language, Restlessly Yours. Her artists' books — Drafts: Letters Unsent, and Box of Fiction — were published by Roman Nvmerals Books, Brooklyn, NY. Daly taught at Vassar College (1990-95) and CUNY (2013-2015). She has work in public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art Watson Collection (New York, NY), The Museum of Modern Art Library (New York, NY), MoCP (Chicago, IL), the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), and MassArt Rare Book Collection (Boston, MA).
Ann Burke Daly’s Spatiotemporal practice includes sculpture; sound; video; performative task-based actions; drawing; wax casting; writing; scripted spoken narrations; research; and objects (found, made, and altered). Her work mines the paradoxes of language and the unconscious; the vagaries of memory and perception; gender and subjectivity; unseen histories; the terrain of the psyche. Ann is currently at work on a new project Mapping Vapours (In Three Acts) which is a meditation on loss and the shifting contours of self—the embodied experience of invisible illness, disability, environmental toxins, family history, and interior domestic spaces—using transformed field-recordings in sound, drawings, beeswax castings, and narrative fragments. This work draws from her earlier project The Automaton Olympia's Cabinet of Curiosities. Contact the studio, here.
Contemporary Context
Ann Burke Daly (b. 1961, US; aka Ann Daly) is an American Interdisciplinary Artist who lives and works in New York. Daly’s art practice is time-based and consists of installation artworks. Her work and practice can be understood in relation to post-minimalism; contemporary installation, conceptual, and performance art. Daly is a graduate of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (1994), and she earned an M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art (1990, painting). Daly's early projects,"The Automaton Olympia's Cabinet of Curiosities," from the mid-1990s, and "Again, Someplace Else," (1992–94), put Daly within the emerging field of installation and interdisciplinary practices that challenged existing media categories and hierarchies in dialogue with developments in film and literature, post-structuralist thought, and feminism. Installation artworks from Daly's project The Automaton Olympia's Cabinet of Curiosities used an expanded sensory range including sound, smell, haptics, bodily awareness (proprioception), and time. Her works address viscerally felt yet ineffable and invisible sensations. She worked in the 1990s with themes such as the vagaries of memory and perception, the double, fictions of the subject, family history, domestic space, gender, the body, and the uncanny. Daly creates reconfigurable installation fragments that are only temporarily fixed during installation with steel pins or the weight of objects themselves; and in her use of asynchronous looping that creates endless permutations of image and or sound combinations; rewritings and incompletion. She developed a slow pseudo-forensic methodology of close looking and listening, and the use of performative methods and staging. Further, her use of non-linear and disrupted narrative, and focus on repetition as generative, places importance on the function of interval and the creation of shifting edges and liminal space. Her early work of the 1990s was included in several critically noted group exhibitions featuring emergent media installation artworks such as Narrative Urge (NY, NY, and Uppsala, Sweden), The Mourning After: Art of Loss (LA, CA), Photography in an Expanded Field (NY, NY), and What do you think you are doing Dave? (Brooklyn, NY).
Artistic Approach
Through the arc of my artistic practice, I employ a pseudo-forensic documentary approach, which includes slow and close looking, perception and recording to make present what is invisible, unknown, ungraspable – the ineffable.
The works are installations– mise-en-scenes of fragments interrogating the physicality of bodies, architecture, materials, and lived experience. This haptic approach produces ruptured surfaces that speak to incompletion of memory, perception, and language which I explore through ideas such as the body-in-pieces, multiple points of view, non-linear narrative, the archive or index which cannot contain its objects, and the ungraspable city.
My work is a choreography of objects, images, sounds, marks, and utterances, experienced through time and place. I approach all of these materials as sculptural and think of how my passage through space is marked by the traces of steps, gestures, and performative actions. I translate this awareness to my viewer, drawing their attention to the specificity of materials, the relationship of the scale of the installation and components to their body.
Working with an excess of performative actions I create an unruly surplus of evidence or trace. By revealing what is unseen yet viscerally felt—I create shadow archives which accumulate to point towards hidden histories and cultural hauntings; to speak otherwise. I invite the audience to repeat my process of a slow tactile sensory awareness, forging an intimacy with them as I ask them to stand with me as detectives.
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to these Institutions:
New York State Council on the Arts; 2024 Artist Support Grant, Interdisciplinary Art • MILLAY ARTS; 2023 April Core Residency, Visual Art; NYSCA/NYFA; Artists with Disabilities Pandemic Grant 2022 • Berkshire Taconic Foundation; Martha Boschen Porter Fund Prize • Puffin Foundation; Visual Art Grant 2022 • Yale Women Faculty Forum; Art, Feminism, Dialogue panel with Professor Laura Wexler, 2021 • VCFA; Artist-In-Residence, 2021 • Wesleyan University; Visiting Artist, 2020 • UCLM Universidad De Castilla–LaMancha (ES); Visiting Artist Conference, 2019, Half-Life: Ann Burke Daly Obra Reciente • Brumario (ES); Half-Life created in association with this Madrid cultural organization • YADDO; Visual Artist Residency, 2018 • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Interdisciplinary Arts Grant, 2017 • Loeb Museum: Other People's Pictures, 2017 • MASS MoCA ; Artist Residency 2016 • Creative Capital; On Our Radar, 2016 and 2017 • Puffin Foundation; Arts Grant 2016 • American Academy in Rome; Visiting Artist 2015 • LMCC (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) + Creative Capital; Artists Summer Institute, 2015 • UnFramed + Susan Stein Shiva Theater; Performance-Event Sponsors: Conversations & Specters, 2016 • Women Make Movies; Fiscal Sponsor, NYSCA film and video 2019 • Roman Nvmerals Books; Published Volumes XVII + LVII, 2016 • Vassar College; Art Faculty 1990–1995 • CUNY, City University of New York; Visiting Faculty, 2013–2015 • Yale School of Art; MFA 1990 • The Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program (ISP); Fellow, Studio Art, 1993–1994. ABD Studio is also grateful to many individuals for participation and dialogue.
Studio Contact
Contact the studio here for more information about Ann's work.Some reviews and exhibition information can be found on this page: reviews & publications and on academia.edu. You can find Ann on Instagram.
Photo Info:
Top of Page: Ann Burke Daly at Millay Arts Studio, Artist Residency. 2023, with "Day Drawings," part of the current project Mapping Vapours (2022-ongoing).