Anna Ullrich


	Anna Ullrich Notre Dame, Indiana
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		E-mail this artist at anna.m.ullrich.1@nd.edu.
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My work generally engages themes found in popular culture that describe an antagonistic relationship between the sexes and in particular the portrayal of sexual relations. I'm fascinated by the narrative of men as "sexual beasts" and the ways that this constructed gender-relational understanding disenfranchises women and empowers men. Bound by the limits of our own imaginations, we must be concerned with what sources feed, nurture, and inevitably define our consciousness. I'm curious to discover what narratives, whether fictional or non-fictional, women consume and why certain negative ("negative" in my opinion, naturally) roles engage us. My work explores the ways that women may negotiate their readings as audience members when faced with that media which is biased for a male audience at the expense of the female experience, which seems to be very narrowly defined in comparison.

I claim no aesthetic mentors and I do not probe other art very much. If my style has influences it comes from the daily visual osmosis that occurs by contact with advertising, television, newspapers, magazines, films, comics and any form of photography. I am attracted to visual forms that occur outside of artistic production, such as for advertising, journalism, illustration: anything that makes no claims to individual self-expression. I am interested in the function the images are serving and the form they then acquire to meet that function.

To hear me discuss my images is to listen to a conglomeration and at times ad hoc linking of various personal experiences/observations, media manifestations, random epiphanies, inspired analogies, my research of another person's assessments of another person's research of another person's psychological reality.This is self-expression dragged through the public square, beaten unconscious, tormented, drugged, and forced through group therapy until it emerges visually edible. As one critic commented in response to my lengthy explanation of an image, "This is a stone you've worried over too much."