Anne Carney Raines American, b. 1990
My background in scenic painting has drawn me to the stage and its many layers of reality. The curtain represents a boundary between the spectator and fictive space. However, without actors, this boundary creates a minimal and transitional zone, with the potential to explore multiple narratives.
–Anne Carney Raines
Anne Carney Raines (b. 1990, Nashville, Tennessee) is based in London. She has a background in scenic painting and this has drawn her to the stage and its unfolding layers of reality. The curtain represents a boundary between the spectator and fictive space. However, without actors, this boundary creates a minimal and transitional zone, with the potential to explore multiple narratives. Anne Carney is drawn to passages, doorways, and paintings within paintings. These motifs become places she yearns to go to but can never enter. About her paintings she says, “I have the feeling if I walk into this space, there will be another one behind it creating a never-ending cycle.” There is an obsession with shadow in her work that has its root in Tromp L’oeil painting. The layers of reality within her paintings become hyperreal and embrace the ‘lies’ of painting and the fabrications of theatre to build a world within the works. Currently she is interested in ideas around collective memory, the oasis, and exterior/interior environments.
