Anna B Nunes’ BFA thesis exhibition was originally scheduled from March 30–April 3 in the Isabelle Percy West Gallery on CCA’s Oakland campus. Due to the Bay Area’s COVID-19 shelter-in-place order, we are sharing work by Anna and other graduating students on CCA’s website and social media channels. 

Artwork by Anna B Nunes will be featured on CCA's official social media channels, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, starting April 20 at 9am PDT.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Because my body is the vehicle through which I experience the world, it is this body that I choose to interview and incorporate into my work. My work uses queer feminist theory in communication with personal gendered experience as a theoretical and conceptual backbone. I employ textile techniques, media, and metaphors as a material and visual language. I often look to theorists and academics, such as Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed, for guidance and inspiration. Particularly, I am interested in both academics’ ideas about gender socialization, what Ahmed calls “girling” as well as Butler’s work about gender performativity. 

Though I look at this theoretical work, I ultimately represent my own experience with girling and gendered existence. I have found that expressing my own truth, instead of attempting to represent that of others, creates the most resonance. My work is often an externalization of my internal gender performance. I am interested in Kate Bornstein’s concept of gender “splattering”, or one’s gender performance changing based on external situations. Through my work, I explore how my own identity fragments and how these gender expressions interact within me, both antagonizing and adoring one another. 

My impulse to act through textiles as a language emerges from the relationship that textiles have with the body and identity expression, as well as their ubiquitousness. The body both creates fiber and textile-adjacent structures as well as adopts outside textile objects, such as clothing, for protection, adornment, and expression. The adoption of these objects is so complete that they become synonymous with the body itself.

BIO

Anna B Nunes is a textile and fiber artist from the San Francisco Bay Area currently living and working in the East Bay. Nunes positions herself as a queer feminist artist and is dedicated to feminist discourses and activism.

Right: Anna B Nunes, Untitled (detail), 2019. Nylon stockings, artist's hair, cotton thread.

To view more work by Anna B Nunes, visit annabnunes.com or follow @annabeeen on Instagram.