About Me
Anna Brangoccio
Art school and I broke up early, and I taught myself the rest by ruining a lot of paper. Art has been the constant since I was a kid in Denver, and even during the long stretches when I wasn’t making anything, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The work is personal, and it’s also a kind of report. I move toward the difficult on purpose, and it rearranges me a little. I’m processing my experience, and at the same time I’m observing it as a universal condition. If something in it lands, good. If not, at least it looks cool on a wall.
My Practice
Mostly I mess around. And make plenty of actual messes in the process. Luckily, something cohesive comes from it, most of the time. The mediums are scattered: paint, ink, watercolor, charcoal, pastel, colored pencil, a lot of magazine clippings and other found images, along with whatever else suits the piece. That’s what I mean when I say, “Mixed Media.” The idea forms as the piece unfolds. Sometimes my hands get there before I do.
What stays constant isn’t the material, it’s the method. I put unlike things in the same frame to see what they do to each other. A bat means one thing. A bat beside a butterfly means something else. Humans think symbolically, and I like to get in there and poke at it. The medium keeps changing because the idea keeps changing, but the impulse underneath it doesn’t.
A lot of it comes back to contradiction and coexistence. Light beside dark, life beside death, with no interest in settling which one wins, because neither can. I’m interested in the liminal space between these things, and in what happens when they’re allowed to remain there together. Sometimes that tension integrates, and sometimes it stays unresolved. Either way, transformation doesn’t erase what came before. It carries it forward in another form.
Building Occio has meant coming back to work I made across very different versions of myself. Finishing it, revisiting it, and finally seeing it together has taught me more about myself as an artist than I expected. The themes I thought I was discovering were often already there. I just hadn’t learned how to recognize them yet.
Oh, see? Oh…
