Anne Rowland

Spinning as fast as you can in circles, arms outstretched, you watch the world blur—trees become abstract shapes, colors intensify, and familiar surroundings transform. When you finally hit the ground, dizzy and disoriented, the world around you bends into something simultaneously familiar and new.

It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen features fourteen new works by Anne Rowland, each transforming a real location into something otherworldly.

I work with aerial imagery from Google Maps’ “Satellite View.” I begin by making hundreds of screenshots and then assemble them in Photoshop into a large, legible aerial view of a location.   This composite becomes the ground from which the image is transformed with software.

Through processes of stretching, warping, and reworking, the source material slowly departs from its origin. Recognizable geographies loosen and reorganize themselves into something more ambiguous.    I manipulate the imagery, looking for the moment when something unexpected or foreign emerges out of it, unstable and turbulent. 

These pictures exist at the intersection of photography, software, and painting. The photographic component is the machine-made aerial image itself.  Software operates throughout the process: in the primary automated capture of the satellite imagery, in its assembly for online viewing, in my secondary act of capture through screenshots, and finally in the digital manipulation that shapes the image into its finished form. The result is a picture that begins as a kind of documentation and ends up as an abstract invention.

~Anne Rowland