Anne Carney Raines

Anne Carney Raines (b.1990) is a painter from Nashville, Tennessee currently living in London, UK. She pursued her BFA in painting at Indiana University, Bloomington and is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. She has a background in scenic painting and fabrication which has had a major impact on her artwork as she deals with topics around theatre, transitional space, and collective memory. Recent exhibitions include New Contemporaries 2020 at South London Gallery. Currently exhibitions include and A Space to Hold a Gaze at Liliya Gallery and Between the Acts at Wilder Gallery, a two-person show with fellow MA Painting graduate Catherine Repko.

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. I am drawn to passages, doorways, and spaces within spaces. These motifs become places I am yearning to go but can never enter into. I have the feeling if I walk into this space, there will be another one behind it creating a never-ending cycle.

I am attracted to sentient spaces that change with either the presence or absence of the figures inside them. There is an obsession with shadow in my work that has its root in Tromp L’oeil painting. The layers of reality within the painting become hyperreal. In this way I like to embrace the lies of painting and the fabrications of theatre to build a world within the works. Currently I am interested in ideas around collective memory, transitional places, and fictional history.