FLAW (2020) (Studio View II) FLAW Flex Rings (2021) (Installation View I) End of Water (2021) FLAW Yellow Mesh (2021) (Installation View IV) Staunch Drawing Four (2018) FLAW Floor Walker (2021) (Installation View II) The False Spectator (2016) (Installation View, Suyama Space) Staunch Drawing Seven (2019) (diptych) FLAW (2020) (Studio View I) Caliper (2016) (suspended) End of Water #2 (2020) FLAW Calipers (2021) (Installation View III)
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Artist’s Statement
I am interested in encounters suggesting the fragile necessity of linkage inherent to art making.
Relishing in connections as well as contradictions generated by revising order where conflict becomes compelling, and solutions are deferred.
My work began in painting which I pursued until the early 90s. Then a significant change evolved from an intentional pursuit to take things apart and rebuild noting what needed another identity.
This shift began to disperse my attention to investigating sequence as an inevitable discourse of disruption and misdirection. Displacement being a persistent offering.
Born in 1935 in Indianapolis, Joan Tanner has lived in Southern California since the mid-1960s. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1957 and began her career as a painter. She has been consistently exhibiting her paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and site-specific installations since 1968. Tanner maintains a vigorous studio practice somewhat akin to a laboratory and is inspired by spatial contradictions, archetypal geometric forms and raw materials. Her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections and in the following public collections: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Harvard University, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphics, Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, New York City, NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California. Over the years, Tanner has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California–Santa Barbara, Ohio University in Athens, Illinois State University at Normal, and an artist-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.