Ana Maria Farina
Fog, texture, textile, pattern, blue, symmetrical
2024

About the Item

Ana Maria Farina paints using a gun––a tufting gun––along with needles, hooks, and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, she conjures vibrant objects of comfort that inhabit a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation. Ana Maria was born and raised in Brazil and is now based in the Hudson Valley, New York. She received her masters degree in Art and Art Education from Columbia University in 2016, and in 2018 she was awarded a fellowship to the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. In 2019, she received a scholarship to attend the MFA program at SUNY New Paltz, where she also served as the Visiting Artist Director and Instructor of Record. Ana’s work has been featured in many spaces throughout New York and she has upcoming exhibitions at the Wassaic Project, the Garrison Art Center, the Samuel Dorsky Museum, among others. She is also the 2021 recipient of the CAA Professional Development Fellowship in Visual Arts. Ana Maria Farina creates her work with a tufting gun, needles, hooks and knots. Repurposing a phallic signifier of violence, her work inhabits a mystical pictorial space between abstraction and representation. Farina’s works on view in Talking Threads—entitled histérica #2 (hysterical #2) and histérica #4 (hysterical #4)—reference the outdated medical practice of diagnosing women with hysteria for a wide variety of symptoms including sexually forward behavior, anxiety, fainting and more. In recent decades, the feminist movement has adopted hysteria as a symbol of the systematic oppression of women while reclaiming the term for themselves. For Farina, her work represents hysteria as a manifestation of the unconscious mind ferociously unbound. Her smaller works in the exhibition are part of her “Naptime” series and were created while her infant daughter slept. Inspired by the beauty of the mid-Hudson Valley landscape, storm king and pôr do sol sobre o rio hudson (translated to Sunset Over the Hudson River) reference Farina’s memory of driving her daughter home on a beautiful afternoon around sunset. Exhibited in "Talking Threads," Susan Eley Fine Art, Hudson, NY

Creator:

Ana Maria Farina (Brazilian)

Creation Year:

2024

Dimensions:

Height: 9 in (22.86 cm)Width: 9 in (22.86 cm)Depth: 0.5 in (1.27 cm)

Medium:

Textile

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-